15 ms·

"The whole process should be in English. I don’t care that it is Germany. English. English. English. I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorp

"The whole process should be in English. I don’t care that it is Germany. English. English. English. I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorporation was not covered in my Volkhochschule classes nor Duolingo." The process is difficult because I refuse to learn the language of the country. My first reaction was "What an absolute asshole", my second reaction is the same but with a paragraph of text explaining the reasons he's an asshole.

Major_Grooves 4y ago
That is wilfully distorting what I have written. I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German. The language is only one part of what makes it complicated. It is very difficult for Germans too. Nevertheless, the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies. Current status is that people are warned against incorporating here.
- sgt 4y ago
  You should have put it in another way, then. Anyway, the main issue here doesn't seem the language, rather that the process itself is complicated no matter how you look at it. I think that should be the point of focus which I guess you did, but the rant about German was a bit distracting.)
  - Major_Grooves 4y ago
    yeah I did edit the article afterwards to admit the comment was flippant and explain what I really meant. Language is the small part of the problem here. Really, it is the process that is bad.
- petre 4y ago
  > the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies Good luck with that - Ausländern setting up companies in Germany without speaking German. They'll probably incorporate in Estonia or Ireland. It's way easier to set up a company in post communist Eastern Europe.
  - Major_Grooves 4y ago
    well that was rather my point. Estonia makes it easy for non-Estonians to incorporate there. Germany should do similar.
    - _njyk 4y ago
      The fun fact: when you live in Estonia, you get German gov-supported Facebook Ads to incorporate your company in Germany. For example, recently getting a new one: https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/ https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/
      - kaashif 4y ago
        I find that ad funny. > Don't believe everything about Bavaria. Just believe the facts. Maybe it's because of the article I just read, but I'm reading that like "Don't believe everything you've heard about how Germany is a terrible place to do business." Presumably if New York or San Francisco had ads encouraging people to start companies there, they would want people to believe everything they've heard.
- q-big 4y ago
  > I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German. As a native German speaker, I really would not consider > I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorporation was not covered in my Volkhochschule classes nor Duolingo. to be fluent in German. In such kind of language discussions, I often see that in the USA vs Germany, there seems to be a quite different understanding of fluency in the native languages: - In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen - In German(y), you are considered to be a fluent speaker when you are able to speak the language on quite a high level
  - marcus0x62 4y ago
    > - In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen American here. I would not consider such a person to be fluent in English, and I don’t know anyone else who would, either. We don’t have our own special, lesser, definition of fluency. Based on your written grammar, I would not consider you fluent in English.
    - the_common_man 4y ago
      What was wrong with his written English, that you consider it not fluent?
      - marcus0x62 4y ago
        Writing "somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen", while not wrong, is unnatural. Same for "In such kind of language discussions". Those constructs aren't wrong, or even particularly bad, but to me they immediately out the writer as someone who does not have native-level fluency.
        q-big 4y ago
        How would you formulate these phrases then? For the phrases that you list, I actually did look them up in the dictionary beforehand when I wrote my comment to be sure that I express them correctly in English. "fellow countrymen": according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=Landsleute https://www.dict.cc/?s=Landsleute "fellow countrymen" is the English translation of the German word "Landsleute". If you tell me that in the phrase "In such kind of language discussions" I forgot an "a" (i.e. "In such a kind of language discussions"), you are surely right. Otherwise: according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=solcherart https://www.dict.cc/?s=solcherart "such a kind" is the English translation of "solcherart".
- Ekaros 4y ago
  If the foreigners aren't ready to spend couple thousand in fees to setup a company are they worth it in first place? Germany isn't exactly poor. And in general it might be better for them to garner those that can follow their rules and operate in their system. Setting up limited liability company or equivalent would any way be couple thousand max? If someone wasn't going to invest this much, how much were they going to do anyway?
- blueflow 4y ago
  Dann lern halt Deutsch anstelle im Internet rumzuheulen, dass Menschen in einem FREMDEN Land nicht deine Sprache sprechen. Junge, wenn du kein Deutsch kannst, hol dir halt einen Übersetzer oder komm halt nicht her. Wäre es gleichermaßen zu erwarten, das ich in Großbritannien eine Firma auf Deutsch registrieren kann? Ich denk, das wäre vermessen.
  - Major_Grooves 4y ago
    I kinda suspect you did not read the actual article, based on what you write here. Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      > Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English. That was bait to expose your double standards. Germany is a German-speaking country, if you want to do business here, you should really do it in German. I could criticise your approach with the founding, but the other comments did that well enough. I'd largely parrot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33588536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33588536 . I think "Entitlement" captures the essence of your article well. You did not research how to do it and created most parts of the mess yourself, and then blamed it on the german system. Of course this is going to aggravate people, me included. If i was you, i'd take the article down because i would not want to be seen as a incompetent founder. Its one thing to fail at challenges, its another to put it online where people can find it when they google your name.
chrisseaton 4y ago
Wouldn't it be better to welcome and accommodate educated and enthusiastic foreigners who want to invest in your country and its people, rather than being a language purist for the sake of it? Can a country like Germany afford to be picky with people trying to invest in it?
- sgt 4y ago
  Where is Germany the company listed again, NASDAQ? I want to invest. /s
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Have you never heard of foreign investment? People bringing their capital, but also their skills and knowledge? Despite scare-mongering about immigrants, it's often a really great thing that we should encourage.
  - robocat 4y ago
    There are plenty of foreign companies listed on American stock exchanges using “American Depository Receipts”: for example the 100 billion dollar German company SAP is listed as an ADR on the NYSE (although not NASDAQ, sorry) https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SAP https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SAP There is a list of 460 foreign companies cross listed on US stock exchanges, and that list includes a handful of german companies, although somewhere else said that there are 21 German companies listed using ADR, so perhaps the list is incomplete? https://stockmarketmba.com/listofadrs.php https://stockmarketmba.com/listofadrs.php
- Major_Grooves 4y ago
  that is pretty much what I mean. People take what I wrote as an insult to the German language and country. I love Germany, and the language. I learned it and gained German citizenship. I want the country to succeed and do well. Currently, the business registration process is a hindrance. They should take a leaf from Estonia's book and simplify the process. Including making it possible to navigate the whole process in English.
firecall 4y ago
ad hominem attacks on HN should be avoided. Critique the article, don’t insult the person! We can make online discussion a nicer place! :-)
Scoundreller 4y ago
I mean, even in anglo countries, most native English speakers won't have the vocabulary for company formation. Then there are legal terms that don't really translate well. Then sometimes DIYers get punished because the official instructions are vague/ambiguous, obviously never went through a UAT session, and/or fail to mention a questionable policy change that they informed every lawyer of through unofficial channels, but didn't feel the need to, you know, actually publish... (fuck you Canada Border Services Agency). I'm going through a process for a small slavic country's citizenship, and all the forms need to be in that language. Many of the native speakers I talk to still get slipped up on some of the terminology because they didn't go get much education there before they emigrated.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
luckylion 4y ago
You can take your driver's license test in dozens of languages in Germany. English is the lingua franca, we should make it possible to do all common business tasks in English, because we want people to do business, and all hurdles should be removed as much as possible.
MoSattler 4y ago
On one hand everyone in Germany is complaining about Fachkräftemangel, on the other hand the attitude is "In Deutschland haben wir Deutsch zu sprechen!". I think if any foreigner comes to our country with any form on entrepreneurial spirit, we need to support that and not make it unnecessarily difficult. And frankly, the German used in these kind of transactions can even be hard for us German native speakers.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  TBF, if a foreign entrepreneur doesn't have any mean to overcome the language barrier (either learn the language, have a dedicated translator or hire a lawyer), how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities etc. Any single paper that will have an official value will be in german as well. It loks to me like a decent filter for companies that won't make it very far anyway.
  - MoSattler 4y ago
    > how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities All these things should be available in English, if GER is serious about overcoming the skilled labour shortage.
riedel 4y ago
The process is painfully difficult also for a native speaker. I can totally relate to the report as a German, whose wife went through the same fun recently with her GmbH. Actually, the process for liquidation of the limited can easily be worse. Things btw get a lot easier if you just do not open a limited (e.g. an engineering office). So all this is seems on purpose: if you survive the purgatory and are willing to burn money continuously to finance the system, you deserve some trust. That it does not make much sense in the modern global startup world is another story.
School-Cotton 4y ago
It’s not unreasonable to expect a country that wants to attract foreign investment to make it possible to interact with the bureaucracy in English. Whether Germany wants to attract foreign investment is of course their own decision to make, but I’m assuming here that they do. It would be nice if a neural international language like Esperanto had caught on, but it hasn’t. In actually existing reality English is the global common language.
littlecranky67 4y ago
> The process is difficult because I refuse to learn the language of the country. My first reaction was "What an absolute asshole" To be fair, I think within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english (at least inofficial translations). And I say this as someone who is native in German, speaks two other EU-official languages, and currently resides in another EU country which language I do not speak. "Learning a language" is just not something that you do overnight, it takes decades, especially when you are busy being a full-time entrepreneur. And within the EU, the idea is to boost cross-border entrepreneurship and economic growth. Wasting time on learning yet another language will not make me contribute to the economy.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  > within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english German is by far the most common native language in the EU. (Germany, Austria, parts of Italy, Belgium, Denmark, ...) whereas English as native language is a small thing since Brexit with only Ireland and Malta. But that aside: Translating legal texts with all details and traditional interpretation and adaptions by court rulings is a complicated thing. There can be a lot of nuance in each detail. And also once you do that you have to allow proceedings in English for the complete chain. From the clerk in the government office to the constitutional court. But I think Germany would be somewhat open to that, but others, like France? Hard time to imagine them accepting anything but French.

Major_Grooves 4y ago

That is wilfully distorting what I have written. I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German. The language is only one part of what makes it complicated. It is very difficult for Germans too. Nevertheless, the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies. Current status is that people are warned against incorporating here.

sgt 4y ago
You should have put it in another way, then. Anyway, the main issue here doesn't seem the language, rather that the process itself is complicated no matter how you look at it. I think that should be the point of focus which I guess you did, but the rant about German was a bit distracting.)
- Major_Grooves 4y ago
  yeah I did edit the article afterwards to admit the comment was flippant and explain what I really meant. Language is the small part of the problem here. Really, it is the process that is bad.
petre 4y ago
> the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies Good luck with that - Ausländern setting up companies in Germany without speaking German. They'll probably incorporate in Estonia or Ireland. It's way easier to set up a company in post communist Eastern Europe.
- Major_Grooves 4y ago
  well that was rather my point. Estonia makes it easy for non-Estonians to incorporate there. Germany should do similar.
  - _njyk 4y ago
    The fun fact: when you live in Estonia, you get German gov-supported Facebook Ads to incorporate your company in Germany. For example, recently getting a new one: https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/ https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/
    - kaashif 4y ago
      I find that ad funny. > Don't believe everything about Bavaria. Just believe the facts. Maybe it's because of the article I just read, but I'm reading that like "Don't believe everything you've heard about how Germany is a terrible place to do business." Presumably if New York or San Francisco had ads encouraging people to start companies there, they would want people to believe everything they've heard.
q-big 4y ago
> I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German. As a native German speaker, I really would not consider > I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorporation was not covered in my Volkhochschule classes nor Duolingo. to be fluent in German. In such kind of language discussions, I often see that in the USA vs Germany, there seems to be a quite different understanding of fluency in the native languages: - In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen - In German(y), you are considered to be a fluent speaker when you are able to speak the language on quite a high level
- marcus0x62 4y ago
  > - In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen American here. I would not consider such a person to be fluent in English, and I don’t know anyone else who would, either. We don’t have our own special, lesser, definition of fluency. Based on your written grammar, I would not consider you fluent in English.
  - the_common_man 4y ago
    What was wrong with his written English, that you consider it not fluent?
    - marcus0x62 4y ago
      Writing "somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen", while not wrong, is unnatural. Same for "In such kind of language discussions". Those constructs aren't wrong, or even particularly bad, but to me they immediately out the writer as someone who does not have native-level fluency.
      - q-big 4y ago
        How would you formulate these phrases then? For the phrases that you list, I actually did look them up in the dictionary beforehand when I wrote my comment to be sure that I express them correctly in English. "fellow countrymen": according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=Landsleute https://www.dict.cc/?s=Landsleute "fellow countrymen" is the English translation of the German word "Landsleute". If you tell me that in the phrase "In such kind of language discussions" I forgot an "a" (i.e. "In such a kind of language discussions"), you are surely right. Otherwise: according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=solcherart https://www.dict.cc/?s=solcherart "such a kind" is the English translation of "solcherart".
Ekaros 4y ago
If the foreigners aren't ready to spend couple thousand in fees to setup a company are they worth it in first place? Germany isn't exactly poor. And in general it might be better for them to garner those that can follow their rules and operate in their system. Setting up limited liability company or equivalent would any way be couple thousand max? If someone wasn't going to invest this much, how much were they going to do anyway?
blueflow 4y ago
Dann lern halt Deutsch anstelle im Internet rumzuheulen, dass Menschen in einem FREMDEN Land nicht deine Sprache sprechen. Junge, wenn du kein Deutsch kannst, hol dir halt einen Übersetzer oder komm halt nicht her. Wäre es gleichermaßen zu erwarten, das ich in Großbritannien eine Firma auf Deutsch registrieren kann? Ich denk, das wäre vermessen.
- Major_Grooves 4y ago
  I kinda suspect you did not read the actual article, based on what you write here. Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    > Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English. That was bait to expose your double standards. Germany is a German-speaking country, if you want to do business here, you should really do it in German. I could criticise your approach with the founding, but the other comments did that well enough. I'd largely parrot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33588536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33588536 . I think "Entitlement" captures the essence of your article well. You did not research how to do it and created most parts of the mess yourself, and then blamed it on the german system. Of course this is going to aggravate people, me included. If i was you, i'd take the article down because i would not want to be seen as a incompetent founder. Its one thing to fail at challenges, its another to put it online where people can find it when they google your name.

chrisseaton 4y ago

Wouldn't it be better to welcome and accommodate educated and enthusiastic foreigners who want to invest in your country and its people, rather than being a language purist for the sake of it? Can a country like Germany afford to be picky with people trying to invest in it?

sgt 4y ago
Where is Germany the company listed again, NASDAQ? I want to invest. /s
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Have you never heard of foreign investment? People bringing their capital, but also their skills and knowledge? Despite scare-mongering about immigrants, it's often a really great thing that we should encourage.
- robocat 4y ago
  There are plenty of foreign companies listed on American stock exchanges using “American Depository Receipts”: for example the 100 billion dollar German company SAP is listed as an ADR on the NYSE (although not NASDAQ, sorry) https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SAP https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SAP There is a list of 460 foreign companies cross listed on US stock exchanges, and that list includes a handful of german companies, although somewhere else said that there are 21 German companies listed using ADR, so perhaps the list is incomplete? https://stockmarketmba.com/listofadrs.php https://stockmarketmba.com/listofadrs.php
Major_Grooves 4y ago
that is pretty much what I mean. People take what I wrote as an insult to the German language and country. I love Germany, and the language. I learned it and gained German citizenship. I want the country to succeed and do well. Currently, the business registration process is a hindrance. They should take a leaf from Estonia's book and simplify the process. Including making it possible to navigate the whole process in English.

firecall 4y ago

ad hominem attacks on HN should be avoided. Critique the article, don’t insult the person! We can make online discussion a nicer place! :-)

Scoundreller 4y ago

I mean, even in anglo countries, most native English speakers won't have the vocabulary for company formation. Then there are legal terms that don't really translate well. Then sometimes DIYers get punished because the official instructions are vague/ambiguous, obviously never went through a UAT session, and/or fail to mention a questionable policy change that they informed every lawyer of through unofficial channels, but didn't feel the need to, you know, actually publish... (fuck you Canada Border Services Agency). I'm going through a process for a small slavic country's citizenship, and all the forms need to be in that language. Many of the native speakers I talk to still get slipped up on some of the terminology because they didn't go get much education there before they emigrated.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

luckylion 4y ago

You can take your driver's license test in dozens of languages in Germany. English is the lingua franca, we should make it possible to do all common business tasks in English, because we want people to do business, and all hurdles should be removed as much as possible.

MoSattler 4y ago

On one hand everyone in Germany is complaining about Fachkräftemangel, on the other hand the attitude is "In Deutschland haben wir Deutsch zu sprechen!". I think if any foreigner comes to our country with any form on entrepreneurial spirit, we need to support that and not make it unnecessarily difficult. And frankly, the German used in these kind of transactions can even be hard for us German native speakers.

makeitdouble 4y ago
TBF, if a foreign entrepreneur doesn't have any mean to overcome the language barrier (either learn the language, have a dedicated translator or hire a lawyer), how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities etc. Any single paper that will have an official value will be in german as well. It loks to me like a decent filter for companies that won't make it very far anyway.
- MoSattler 4y ago
  > how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities All these things should be available in English, if GER is serious about overcoming the skilled labour shortage.

riedel 4y ago

The process is painfully difficult also for a native speaker. I can totally relate to the report as a German, whose wife went through the same fun recently with her GmbH. Actually, the process for liquidation of the limited can easily be worse. Things btw get a lot easier if you just do not open a limited (e.g. an engineering office). So all this is seems on purpose: if you survive the purgatory and are willing to burn money continuously to finance the system, you deserve some trust. That it does not make much sense in the modern global startup world is another story.

School-Cotton 4y ago

It’s not unreasonable to expect a country that wants to attract foreign investment to make it possible to interact with the bureaucracy in English. Whether Germany wants to attract foreign investment is of course their own decision to make, but I’m assuming here that they do. It would be nice if a neural international language like Esperanto had caught on, but it hasn’t. In actually existing reality English is the global common language.

littlecranky67 4y ago

> The process is difficult because I refuse to learn the language of the country. My first reaction was "What an absolute asshole" To be fair, I think within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english (at least inofficial translations). And I say this as someone who is native in German, speaks two other EU-official languages, and currently resides in another EU country which language I do not speak. "Learning a language" is just not something that you do overnight, it takes decades, especially when you are busy being a full-time entrepreneur. And within the EU, the idea is to boost cross-border entrepreneurship and economic growth. Wasting time on learning yet another language will not make me contribute to the economy.

johannes1234321 4y ago
> within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english German is by far the most common native language in the EU. (Germany, Austria, parts of Italy, Belgium, Denmark, ...) whereas English as native language is a small thing since Brexit with only Ireland and Malta. But that aside: Translating legal texts with all details and traditional interpretation and adaptions by court rulings is a complicated thing. There can be a lot of nuance in each detail. And also once you do that you have to allow proceedings in English for the complete chain. From the clerk in the government office to the constitutional court. But I think Germany would be somewhat open to that, but others, like France? Hard time to imagine them accepting anything but French.