Some years ago, research revealed that many English-language advertising slogans used by German companies are not understood by the German customers. Here’s a Spiegel report on the subject (July 2004). Endmark in Cologne investigated the matter in 2003 and established, inter alia, that Douglas’ ‘Come in and find out’ was understood by many to mean ‘Find your way in and then find your way out’. Probably based on this, Isabel Kick in Dortmund wrote a diploma thesis in which she measured the skin resistance of twenty-four people and found that they reacted weakly to English slogans and strongly to German ones, such as ‘Geiz ist geil’ (I wonder if they were influenced by the press in that last one, which was mocked throughout the Republic, and I wonder how representative a sample of twenty-four people is). Her work was published as a paperback in September 2004, but the survey took on a life of its own on the Internet, rather like those examples of bad English in hotels all over the world that many translators like to jolly up their websites with (as i18nguy.com points out, these come from Richard Lederer and were probably never translations).

Let’s take the chance to acknowledge Endmark and Richard Lederer, those victims of the Internet!

Now if I am in a foreign hotel, I need to understand the signs. But what about English in advertising slogans? I don’t like it, but is it meant to be understood? English on T-shirts clearly doesn’t need to make sense: it’s just creating an impression. That’s the problem – not that no-one understands it, but that no-one cares if anyone understands it.

Anyway, an article in the otherwise highly respectable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung today (can be purchased online under the title Klartext tut gut) by Sebastian Balzter and Julia Löhr, reports that Denglish is on the retreat in companies and lambasts the practice of declaring English to be a company language.

Der Tiefpunkt? “Das war das Jahr 2000.” Wenn Reiner Pogarell von Krisen spricht, dann interessieren ihn nicht Bilanzen und Aktienkurse – sondern die Sprache, in der über sie geredet wird. “Wenn ein deutsches Unternehmen mit 10 000 Mitarbeitern damals ein Werk in Tschechien mit 200 Mitarbeitern gekauft hat, dann wurde deshalb Englisch zur Arbeitssprache auf allen Ebenen erklärt”, berichtet Pogarell, der mit seinem Paderborner “Institut für Betriebslinguistik” seit 20 Jahren Unternehmen in Sprachfragen berät. “Das galt als modern. Was für eine Eselei!” In den Konferenzen verstummten fortan die Fachkräfte, weil ihnen die passenden englischen Wörter für ihr Expertenwissen fehlten. Die logische Konsequenz, sagt Pogarell: “Die Plapperer haben alles an sich gerissen.”

It appears there are rumours of this kind, that the real experts were deprived of a voice because they did not know the technical terminology in English and this had serious economic consequences. None other than Professor Walter Krämer (here’s a Zeit article about him, Prof. Besserwisser), who supervised and probably suggested Isabel Kick’s thesis in Dortmund, is looking for a student to research the relationship between stock market prices and decisions on company language. He happens to be the President of the Verein Deutsche Sprache too. Krämer’s favourite piece of evidence relates to the car industry: from 1999 to 2003, Daimler-Chrysler shares dropped in value by 30 billion euros, while Porsche’s increased by several hundred million euros:

Krämers bevorzugtes Indiz für den dahinterstehenden Verdacht stammt aus der Autobranche: Von 1999 bis 2003 nahm seinen Berechnungen zufolge der Börsenwert des damals neu geschmiedeten, inzwischen schon wieder zerbrochenen Daimler-Chrysler-Konzerns um 30 Milliarden Euro ab, während der Wert von Porsche um mehrere hundert Millionen Euro zunahm. “Vielleicht war das kein Zufall”, mutmaßt Krämer. Die Zuffenhausener hätten stets an der Arbeitssprache Deutsch festgehalten, die Stuttgarter dagegen 1999 mit Rücksicht auf die neuen Kollegen in Detroit und um der Globalisierung willen ihre Konzernsprache auf Englisch umgestellt.

Following this, the article quotes the old chestnut ‘Come in and find out’ as evidence that English jargon is not understood. Who said the Germans didn’t have a sense of humour? There is more, but I have to do something more serious now.

(Thanks to Marisa)