*spork* *spork*

[ratcreature]

Dear XMFC fanfic fandom,

computer translation is not your friend for creating German sentences for your fiction. Not even short ones, or single words. It will inevitably get all sorts of grammar wrong, like cases, tenses, sentence structure, form of address, word choice...

Then, just as inevitably, I will be thrown out of your generally well written story by the hilariously wrong German, or stumble while trying to figure out what it was supposed to say, and along with me scores of other German speakers (seriously there is no shortage of German speakers around in media fandom). On the upside that also means that there are many, many German speakers available to you, who'll be willing to write you a quick translation as a beta-type service.

But what if you're shy, or afraid to break anon-status, and don't want to ask a German speaker for help? In that case you should consider to skip the dialog and just settle for paraphrases such as "he cursed in German" or the like.

Yours,
RatCreature


As an aside, I also notice that I skip giving feedback to stories I otherwise like that have
this unfortunate problem, because I feel awkward to tack on some sort of red pen correction section onto my squee, but otoh I also don't want to not say something when there are such embarrassing errors there, and pretend I didn't notice. If I know the author, I usually have no problem to mention such nitpicks, but it's different with strangers or anon posters. The same goes for deciding whether to rec things. Argh.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Oh dear - I've seen German speakers offer help publically on the comms, so there's no shortage of willing helpers, not to mention language comms that often help with such requests.

I speak Japanese, and with that language it's not so much people using it wrongly, as people putting technically correct but totally inappropriate short phrases in random places.

[ratcreature]

Usually that problem happens on top of the grammar errors, i.e. sometimes an expression used in English is translated, but it is not an expression in German, and nobody would say something like that.

It is baffling. Not that it doesn't happen in professionally published material too (the main thing I remember from The Time Traveler's Wife is the German mistakes, for example), but still.

And I don't tend to stumble over this in carelessly written fic (where you stumble over homonym errors and typos anyway), but well written stuff, only then you suddenly have a nonsense sentence ambush you.

[rike_tikki_tavi]

Oh, the unfortunate usage of foreign languages. The worst that I've ever come across was a really well written Highlander story where one of Methos' wives was named Detlef. Not really a translation error but jarring anyway.

And the thing about XMFC is, the German in the movie is actually pretty decent. So much so that a friend and I remarked on it after watching it.

[ratcreature]

one of Methos' wives was named Detlef

OMG. ROTFLOL. Jarring indeed.

[brownbetty]

Maybe you could consider making a post of useful german invective. (All my german invective is from nice mennonite boys, so I have no idea how severe it is, and it may actually be in plattdeutsche)

[ratcreature]

Actually German invective is really easy. Generally equivalents to "fuck" aren't used (German "ficken" tends to be really just a crude word for the act, though you can form invectives with it, those will stand out as truly crude and not everyday swearing), but instead you just use "shit" for everything i.e. "Scheisse" and you mostly put it in front of the thing you're cursing, like English speakers will say "fucking such-and-such" in German you say "Scheiss-..." i.e. "Scheisswetter" if you curse the weather, "Scheissverkehr" if you curse the traffic and so on. That is the primary way to make swear words.

Otherwise "asshole" is "Arschloch" (or short "Arsch" for ass), note though that it is "das Arschloch" but "der Arsch" (so you have to watch your articles), the equivalent to "cunt" is "Votze" (but I think it is even cruder than in English, I recall only once that I've heard it in a fight after I was out of my teens), for "bitch" you commonly say "Ziege" or "Zicke" (both literally mean a female goat). And obviously there are lots of pejorative names for women, like "Schlampe" for slut, not used for men afaik, though for someone male you could say the somewhat uncommon (maybe on it's way to oldfashioned? I'm not sure) "Hurenbock" meaning a man who whores around, literally a whore-buck.

The equivalent for "motherfucker" is generally said to be "Wichser" (though literally it means "wanker" as "wichsen" means "to wank", only in the masturbation sense, not kerfuffling, or it can also mean to polish your shoes, but you have to specify the shoe part, and it is not so common but I guess innocently that verb is just for a fast rubbing motion), and "son of a bitch" is generally "Hurensohn" (i.e. son of a whore) but I think it is less common than the English.

There also is a weaker way to make pejoratives without swearing, which I never know how to translate in English. The mechanism is that you can modify most verbs into a noun and then modify them with pre- or postfixes to express disdain, say you dislike someone's singing, the regular noun would be "der Gesang" but you can also take "singen" and make it into "das Gesinge" or into "die Singerei" and neither is a neutral noun, though the latter slightly less pejorative than the former, i.e. that can also just mean not being serious, like in "Spielerei" for a playful diversion less serious than a "Spiel" i.e. a game. Or if you have "reden" (i.e. talk) you can make "das Reden" which neutral act of speaking or "die Rede" which is a talk in the sense of a speech, but there is also "das Gerede" for pointless talking. And when you make negative verbs into nouns like "labern" for "to blather" you don't go for the simple noun "das Labern" (which would be technically correct) but say "das Gelaber" for "the blather" to reinforce the negative connotation. Then of course you can stress it with cursing on top of that, like "Scheissgelaber".

[brownbetty]

Hah! These nouned verbs sound fascinating, and completely foreign (duh). German nouns are already far beyond my comprehension, since I tried to understand case once and had to lie down with a cool towel on my forehead.

But am I understanding correctly that the nouns go to neuter when they become pejorative?

[ratcreature]

No. Verbs used as nouns are neuter i think. But certain endings have determined genders, -rei is usually female, whereas I think "Ge-" also makes something neuter. There are lots of rules how gender correlates to endings in regular words, but thankfully this being my native language I never had to learn them. But if you take "to dance" = "tanzen" then verb into an activity noun directly is "das Tanzen" like "the dancing" in English, whereas "the dance" would be "der Tanz", but you can also say "die Tanzerei" and "das Getanze" which are both slightly pejorative, and feel slightly different, but I can't really say when I'd form one and when the other. For some words only one mechanism sounds right, for some words both work, and for some I'd do neither. Linguists work on explaining that kind of thing, so it's not random.

German cases are fairly simple, what I understand is awful is plurals, because they are so irregular in German, that you can't really predict what the plural will be from the singular, i.e. not like in Latin, where there are just types of words . For plenty of words there are competing plural forms that vary regionally and/or over time as new words are adapted. I've read a linguistics article once that argued against the opinion that the plural in German was just arbitrary, and instead argued that there were in fact rules which explained this with some statistical analysis of how the five different plural endings correlated to the declination types. But really the fact that "they are just random" seems to be an option as position (and that foreign language learners usually are told to just memorize the plural type along with the gender) really says everything.

[ratcreature]

Also, to come back to invectives, obviously there are more context-dependent insults, like a host of racist words and so on, but obviously such words vary fast much like youth slang so if fiction wasn't set in present day it would take research.

Though generally long established is the mechanism to just append "pig" (Schwein) or "sow" (Sau) to something neutral and it becomes an insult or increases it. For example the plain insult for police is "Bullen" (i.e. bulls) and you can increase that to "Bullenschweine" (see the punk band Slime's lyrics) which doesn't make much sense except for the insult mechanism. It works well for a variety of short words at least of one or two syllables, less for longer ones though there it depends a bit how it rolls of the tongue. E.g. if I wanted to insult an American for being an American I would not attach -schwein to "Amerikaner" but would shorten it to "Ami" (colloquial to slightly pejorative for American) first, and then call them "das Amischwein".