puzzling

[ratcreature]

I don't understand how people who try to insert German endearments into their Charles/Erik fanfic end up with female endings. I get that English is deficient when it comes to the concept of grammatical gender, but the auto-translate bots tend to default to male (e.g. if you enter "my Beloved" into Google translate it gives you "mein Geliebter" as first choice not "meine Geliebte" though it gives you neuter if you don't capitalize, presumably because it assumes some noun ought to follow and is indecisive or something), and plenty of endearments authors could pick are the same for both genders anyway (e.g. "mein Schatz"). So how do authors arrive at the female endings? An additional question is of course whether Erik would choose German of all things as his love language to begin with.

Comments

[ratcreature]

The errors are not as hilarious as what happens in commercial comic books. I still remember a Daredevil comic I read where I had to translate German words backwards to figure out what they started out with in English. The best example was when one called the other "Früchtekuchen" because they wanted the English insult "fruit cake" for a crazy person...

Mostly I'm baffled because they artificially make it hard on themselves. It's not like they really needed to insert German endearments in the first place with Erik.

But I'm generally a forgiving reader, and I have soldiered on through worse. I once read a fanfic that wasn't bad as such, but the author had a truly awful problem with homonyms. Every other sentence I had to read a word out loud to understand a sentence that was on the surface completely nonsensical, but actually the author had just written a word which sounds the same or very similar to the word they wanted, but which would have been spelled completely different. Of course this kind of thing could only happen in a language like English which such messed up writing system, but still. That really made reading difficult.