Danke - a Potential Minefield for Non-Native Speakers

It is one of the first words you learn in any language "Danke - Thank you - Grazie - Merci" etc. And yet it is not quite as straightforward as those Travel Guides with an attached vocabulary section make out. Just think of how certain languages - Irish is a good example - totally go over board when it comes to thanking, and how many gradations there are. Go raibh míle míle maith agat for example, even without understanding  it exactly, sounds different from "cheers". German isn't quite so fulsome, but when it comes to saying "Thank you" in German, there are many shadings you want to be aware of.

Anglophone speakers in particular are at peril here. Firstly, they tend not to credit German (and Germans) with being capable of irony, and therefore take German words at face value. Big mistake! Secondly, English language natives are influenced by the similarity of their mother tongue, and tend to translate one to one. Thus, there is a tendency to use "Vielen Dank" (the pronunciation "vealen dank" is optional) rather inflationarily, and "Danke sehr" is also far more popular than it should be. In fact, neither is used very much in German at all. The former has a sort of non-committal, throw-away character, and the latter having definite unfortunate irony markers attached to it. (Similar to "Oh, thanks a lot." in English)

So what should you use then? Well, as so often, it's the tone that makes the difference. Whilst as a non-native speaker you'd assume that the simple "Danke" is far too plain, and might make you out not to be very proficient, it should in fact be your thanking word of choice. Except - be aware of your tone, how expressive you sound! Spoken flatly, it obviously hasn't got much resonance. With a heavy stress on the first syllable however, and a (gradated) enthusiasms marker, if will be always be appropriate. In German, it is extremely important to sound friendly and approachable. Which incidentally is another cardinal oversight on the part of Anglophone speakers. They are simply not aware that there is an "approachability marker" in the German language. As a result, their German often sounds flat, unfriendly, and near-hostile even when grammatically correct.

In written German, you obviously don't have the intonation factor, and have to convey friendliness differently. A good way of expressing a personal appreciation would therefore be "Danke dir", or adding an extra phrase like "Danke dir, das ist (aber) nett". A fashionable, but to many people slightly over the top way of thanking would be "lieben Dank".

Quite obviously, there's a lot more to say about this topic, in fact I think it might well be thesis-worthy. Here, I just wanted to draw attention to the fact, that there's a lot more to such a small word than at first meets the eye.

Quality Control for Translations!

 
Believe me - I don't need reminding that there are many many gifted, inspired, and devoted translators out there, toiling away at the most tediously written and  badly formatted document. Working long hours for little reward. And I can understand that they feel undervalued and underpaid.

Yet translation as a profession (or freelance activity) is such an open-door activity. Increasingly I notice that people with a lot of time on their hands, people who (for whatever reason) prefer to work from home, either because they're mothers, or because they have a second job) are jumping onto the translator bandwagon. A half-finished certificate, an A-level, an evening class, or whatever will provide the ticket to supplementing your income. A hefty spurt of marketing activity, membership in a trade organisation, a bit of slagging off of the old "machine translation" -which nobody in their right mind would ever use other than to get the gist of a text - and you're sorted.

A recently divorced acquaintance of mine is busy translating the most hard-core pharmaceutical texts. Ans she needs the money, she does this night after night, all night. She translates from English into German without any prior pharmaceutical knowledge. Her German? She can just about make herself understood. I call that highly irresponsible.

My husband's company (a major multi-national) commissions translations into almost any language on a regular basis. Very often those translated texts have to be re-done: Nobody in the target country could even understand them!

Look at almost any tourism website - German, English, French... and read the translations. I checked 20 - 16 of them were not just bad, they were hilarious.

Translators like to connect on Social Media. Which has the added benefit (or disadvantage, depending on your viewpoint) that they occasionally write in their second or third language. It is often not a pleasant spectacle.  A lot of them avoid it all costs, and will always reply in their own language. Others never follow bi-lingual people. They probably know why.

All is not well in the field of translation. And whilst you could say this is true for many areas, this is one I can judge. And I don't like what I so frequently see. There is also a strange conspiracy of silence out there. People will not criticise others for fear of being found out themselves. Yet they know that things are not as they should be.(A tiny bit of self-awareness and realistic judgment of one's own abilities would also be beneficial.)

Unless translators themselves will accept that all is not well in their midst, things are bound to deteriorate further. It is simply not good enough to shut up, and hope your client simply won't notice. Or website users will be too polite or inactive to speak up. Just as in other industry segments, quality control, quality assurance and best practice need to be implemented.

Einfach durchwursteln geht selten gut!