GE > EN: Adverb or adjective (guest post by my colleague Hanna)

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.

Translating from French in Switzerland: the case of the "taux plancher"

Many have observed the "shock and awe" shenanigans of the SNB in recent weeks, with the removal of the "taux plancher" against the euro.

How should we translate "taux plancher"?

"Floor rate!" exclaims everyone unanimously.

In German, it is "Mindestkurs".

Thing is, in Switzerland, German is the majority language (in writing, that is). So perhaps instead of saying "floor rate", we should be saying "minimum exchange rate" - which is incidentally the term I've been hearing most often on US financial news channels recently.

"Interest rate floor" seems to be a common term, but "floor (exchange) rate" is starting to look very much like translationese... To make matters worse, the term "cross-currency floor" exists but looks more like an options-based strategy than anything else: http://www.investment-and-finance.net/derivatives/c/cross-currency-floor.html

Another solution is to see the "floor" as a cap against appreciation in the Swiss franc: "the SNB removed its currency cap and let the franc float freely..."

Financial Translation Summer School in Spiez this year

This is always an excellent event. Smart combination of good seminars, nice food and a breath-taking location!

http://new.astti.ch/web/ASTTI_Financial_Translation_Summer_School_SAVE_THE_DATE_424_3-1.php

3rd edition of "Le Ménard"

At long last, I've got my hands on the third edition of the "Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière" by Louis Ménard et al.

Only took my 2 1/2 years from the date of publication in Canada!

Thoroughly recommend getting hold of the CD-ROM. Shame there's no Mac interface but you can't have your cake....

Exclamation marks and "over-punctuating" in French

It's reporting season so I'm translating a considerable amount of analyst commentary on corporate earnings.

When a figure is startlingly good, it is often followed by an exclamation mark.

As writers of English, our initial reaction might be simply to drop the "!". But I'm concerned that we may be loosing a nuance. Example:

Des prises de commandes en hausse de 5.2% pour 2013, dont 20% a/a at T4 !

I translated the last part of the sentence as:

... with a 20% surge in Q4 2013.

(Don't worry about specifying the year-on-year (a/a); it is automatically understood in the Anglosphere).

We must get rid of the extra punctuation but we need a nice powerful noun to avoid loosing some of the original's meaning.

"The nature and genius of the German language"

This is the name of a mammoth tome published by philologist Daniel Boileau in 1840.

Can't say I've read it all but, at one point, he draws attention to the fact that words in German are often cleverly formed by uniting two known ideas.

Listening to the radio, I heard "nun ein Ausschnitt von...", literally a "cut-out". And now, an excerpt from...

In English, we have "excerpt", formed from ex- (out of) and carpere (pluck).

Any German speaker would recognise the two stand-alone words aus and Schnitt. It's harder to spot "carpere"...

I do snow...

As many an English native speaker knows, we have lost control of the English language. Words keep cropping up everywhere and while we recognise the form, the substance has changed.

Classic Frenglish examples are, of course, le lifting or le brushing (a simple blow-dry). Incidentally, the Germans have scored a point for us by taking the French verb friser and coming up with the noun Friseur (hairdresser or barber - NB: Coiffeur tends to be used in Switzerland).

I once asked a Swiss friend if she skied and she replied Non, je fais du snow.

She makes snow...

Nonsense to ears attuned to English. The word snowboard has been shortened to snow by the youth of today. Having the word neige in French ensures there is no confusion.

So, as Hank the Yank would say, "What's the takeaway?" (Two cod and chips plus a pot of mushy peas, please).

Annual report season is upon us and, as ever, the word reporting is ubiquitous. Do we blindly translate it as "reporting" or "reported information", "company data", etc. The context will decide.

Still, let's be careful out there (!) when translating English words that have been hijacked by other languages.

Capita court interpreting contract letting down courts and taxpayers

I'd like to draw attention to this press release on the ITI website:

http://www.iti.org.uk/news-media-industry-jobs/news/544-pi4j-press-release-17-million-lost-in-translation

I heart about this contract with Capital from a friend a couple of years ago. He told me that court interpreters had been "fired" and told that they now had to work through Capita.

This is probably another example of a civil service mandarin trying to compress costs that cannot be reduced: quality interpreting costs money, especially when the stakes are as high as in the criminal justice system!

It's a shameful business and whoever is responsible should be run out of town, although he or she will probably get a year-end bonus regardless of performance plus a gold-plated pension...