Dissecting complex German sentences can sometimes be tricky, and one recurring difficulty is distinguishing adverbs from adjectives.
Take the following example:
“Der prinzipiell stufenlose Gradient wird in konkret quantifizierbare und diskrete Kategorien unterteilt.”
In this sentence, prinzipiell and konkret are adverbs, but their form is the same as an undeclined adjective. (Yes, I know, prinzipiell isn’t generally used as an adjective in German, but it looks like one.)
Alas, German adverbs don’t come with that handy “-ly” suffix to distinguish them from adjectives. But a bit of grammatical analysis will help clear things up. Notice that the adjective following the first bolded adverb (stufenlose) ends in –e. This is because it has been declined for the masculine definite article der. If prinzipiell were an adjective, it would have that same ending. This logic applies to konkret as well, which should carry an –e ending if it were an adjective qualifying die Kategorien (as are quantifizierbare and diskrete).
Punctuation is also a clue in this case. If the author is careful about punctuation (which I’ve not always found to be the case), then the adjectives should all be separated by commas. As there’s no comma between prinzipiell and stufenlose, nor between konkret and quantifizierbare, we are likely dealing with adverbs.
This seemingly trivial distinction between adjectives and adverbs has repercussions for translation. Had these two words been adjectives, the sentence above would have been translated:
“The principal, continuous gradient is sub-divided into concrete, quantifiable and discreet categories.”
When they’re treated as adverbs, the sentence changes slightly:
“The generally continuous gradient is sub-divided into concretely quantifiable, discreet categories.”
The nuances may seem very fine, but they’re important. The ability to correctly identify and translate adverbs will turn a good translation into a more precise, polished one.
