Like-Blog
Presenting you the most interesting translation solutions
Why Like-Blog? Now, first of all, this blog is a blog that you should like (and read regularly) – at least, if you are interested in translation. Then, the topic discussed here is one in which the meaningful likeness between a text and its translation in the language pair English-German plays a key role. On this page, I will take a close look at some interesting translation solutions that I have come across in the course of my work as a translator and translation scholar.
A translation solution is only as good as the arguments that support it. This means that any translation criticism, whether positive or negative, needs to be justified. The quality of a translation solution shows only when we compare it to other possible translation solutions in a given translation situation. Therefore, a translation critic should not only say why a translation solution is bad, but also demonstrate what a better solution might look like. I will try to stick to these principles of translation criticism. So if you have any questions regarding my line of argument or if you disagree, please, let me know your opinion by phone at +49 4171 6086525 or by e-mail to bittner@businessenglish-hamburg.de. So much for the introduction. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this blog!
A crisis of capitalism (February 2022)
In “A Capital Manifesto” (Newsweek.com, 12 June 2009) by Fareed Zakaria, the second sentence goes: “Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix.”
It was translated as follows: “In den vergangenen sechs Monaten wurden Politiker, Geschäftsleute und Experten davon überzeugt, dass wir uns inmitten einer globalen Krise des Kapitalismus befinden, die eine massive Umwandlung und schmerzvolle Jahre erfordert, um sie zu beheben.”
This example shows very well how the unreflected adoption of grammatical structures from English into German can lead to unsatisfactory translation results. The construction “wurden [...] überzeugt” raises the unanswerable question: by whom? Similarly, the expression “eine massive Umwandlung” calls for complementation by an objective genitive, and the “schmerzvolle Jahre” could be rendered more clearly. Finally, the “um [...] zu” infinitive clause reveals an insufficiently reflected sense of language on the part of the translator: for the semantically required agent of “beheben”, “wir”, doesn’t work in the given context (“dass wir uns inmitten einer globalen Krise [...] befinden, [...] um sie zu beheben” – which would be in English: that we are in the midst of a crisis in order to fix it); nor does the syntactically suggested agent, i.e., the relative pronoun “die”, which refers to “Krise” (in this case, the crisis would resolve itself).
To fix the above issues, I suggest the following translation: In den vergangenen sechs Monaten sind Politiker, Geschäftsleute und Experten zu der Überzeugung gelangt, dass wir uns inmitten einer Krise des Kapitalismus befinden, deren Behebung einen massiven Wandel und Jahre voller Entbehrungen erfordert.