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"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?" Nitpicking here, but my god, can Germa
by andrew_eit 4y ago
"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?"
Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?
It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."
This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".
This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.
I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.
Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.
Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.
Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.
Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.
- m2fkxy 4y ago> (...) these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset (...) Well, I think that Germany's commercial balance shows this much better than non-native-sounding-yet-fully-correct grammar.
- bilekas 4y agoI'll nitpick further and say that the grammar is actually perfectly valid.. You don't believe me ?
- mabbo 4y agoThere are the valid grammar rules and there is the way people of the language actually speak. The unspoken rules. If I can read the text and guess what language the original text was in, I would argue that it's not a very good translation.
- moffkalast 4y agoIf there are unspoken rules that can't be defined then they're not rules, they're made up bullshit.
- mabbo 4y agoThey can be defined, but nobody does so explicitly. Consider the classic example of the order of adjectives. You can have a big brown bag, but if you have a brown big bag, something sounds wrong. You can have an excellent blueberry muffin, but not a blueberry excellent muffin. You can meet your 27-year-old Ukrainian friend, but not your Ukrainian 27-year-old friend. Unless you majored in linguistics or learned English as a second language, you probably never once even thought about the rules of adjective order in English (and in other languages the rules are often different!). But you know them, follow them, and people who don't follow them don't sound right to native English speakers. And there are so many weird rules like this.
- 4y ago