I linked earlier to a clip of Nick Clegg speaking Dutch.

Recently the Guardian had an article about all the foreign languages he claims to speak.

His Spanish apparently had its limits:

Trouble came later at question time. Sitting without earphones on – and so without access to the translators – he showed good comprehension but occasionally struggled to understand the precise wording of questions. Clegg himself admitted that his unrehearsed Spanish – despite the practice he gets on frequent trips to his wife’s family home in Olmedo, Valladolid, north-west of Madrid – might not be perfect.

Clegg also spoke German in Berlin. As berlin brief put it:

In the press conference following the meeting on 10 June 2010, the LibDem leader Nick Clegg surprised journalists with his fluent German, raving about the “Berliner Luft” (”Berlin air”).

“I’d like the English journalists to know … his German is excellent”, Foreign Minister Westerwelle commented, the Guardian newspaper reported, perhaps alluding to the generally poor language abilities of English journalists, and to Coomarasamy insisting on framing his questions in English in the press conference in Berlin last year.

Possibly his fluent Dutch helps with the German. But I think we need to hear him. Westerwelle is bound to make a remark to British journalists in view of his record.

LATER NOTE: Kalebeul in more detail and with a video on Clegg’s Spanish.

Thanks to our Spanish correspondent, who will be reporting on Clegg’s Catalonian.

It really doesn’t matter how many false or genuine anglicisms German contains, or how many peculiar terms a German may use when speaking English, as long as the terms are comprehensible.

But when it comes to international football, it’s probably safer to use the terms usual in English.

Collected from various sources:

Greenkeeper groundsman
Relegation play-off
Weltmeisterschaft World Championship World Cup (but we do call the winners the world champions!)
Tackling tackle
Dribbling dribble
Trainer manager/coach

Stuart Dykes, Working Languages, False friends, good and bad translation, Denglisch, Tipps für Übersetzer

Meanwhile, Vertigo has a quote from the translation of Peter Handke’s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) – the translation is by Michael Roloff, incidentally.

“The goalkeeper is trying to figure out which corner the kicker will send the ball into,” Bloch said. “If he knows the kicker, he knows which corner he usually goes for. But maybe the kicker is also counting on the goalie’s figuring this out. So the goalie goes on figuring that just today the ball might go into the other corner. But what if the kicker follows the goalkeeper’s thinking and plans to shoot into the usual corner after all? And so on, and so on.”

I heard about the version of Lena’s song that was done by eight students from Münster for the World Cup: Schland o Schland, but I was too slow to realize it was a short form of Deutschland.

Wortistik goes into more detail. The term was coined by Stefan Raab in 2006, and he used it frequently during the 2006 World Cup. It’s now protected as a trademark.

Another word new to me this week was Vollhorst. It is a colloquial term meaning idiot. I met it in a text a few years old, but it seemed to me it must have been used in connection with Horst Köhler in recent weeks. And sure enough, the combination of Vollhorst and Köhler has been around for quite a while, more on blogs and Facebook than in newspapers though.

Uwu Lena singing Schland o Schland on youtube.

Entry at Football and Music

LATER NOTE: Here’s a link to a version of the video with the text on it.

While we’re wondering about public viewing as an English term in German, the Economist’s new language blog, Johnson, turns to how to translate Wildsau and Gurkentruppe into English. (Rumpelstilzchen is no problem: Rumpelstiltskin is the English for him). These are terms of abuse exchanged between the CDS/CSU and FDP this week.

Germany has a cranky coalition government and garrulous politicians, and so conditions are good for political insults. In one intramural fight a health ministry official from the liberal FDP likened the CSU—Bavarian conservatives—to a Wildsau, or wild pig, for its rough handling of the liberals’ health-reform ideas. But the better insult was the riposte by the CSU man, who called the liberals a Gurkentruppe, literally a troop of cucumbers. Anglophone journalists have been puzzling over how to turn this into recognisable English.

Wild pig is an odd term – the animals are usually called wild boars in English. I suppose you could say wild sow, but I don’t think that is the natural term. Schwein and Sau are both terms commonly used to refer to pigs, so there’s no intended emphasis on the female.

The Gurkentruppe makes me think of a kind of Dad’s Army battalion. Wiktionary says it’s football slang. It was taken as a name by a group who sang football songs, and it is said to be a football term Leipzig University has a lot of 2005 examples, when the term was used as an insult for a political party, but nothing earlier. A Google search ordered by date shows that before this week the term was being frequently used, often for football teams and sometimes for politicians. According to the article, there are even theories that the term came from cricket, but that sounds very far-fetched to me.

(Google Books search also throws up some older examples of Gurkentruppe).

Meanwhile, Maurice Claypole in the Guardian has an interesting article about the importance of translating into one’s own language when learning a foreign one, and the importance of learning to translate.

Although translation exercises are included in the syllabus of state schools, they are generally absent in the further education sector. The majority of Germany’s 957 Volkshochschulen, which provide over six million hours of language training to just under 2 million learners each year, favour communicative language teaching (CLT) which focuses almost entirely on oral practice in the target language.It is perhaps also significant that while state-schools teachers are drawn almost entirely from the local population, the adult education sector includes a high percentage of native English speaker teachers who received their training in an English-only environment in which translation was not an option.

The foreign languages courses at Volkshochschulen (evening class institutes) in Bavaria have certainly been completely taken over by communicative teaching. I once tried to learn Turkish that way. The teacher promised the first week he would never use German again, but fortunately the opposite was the case. However, the book we were obliged to use, picking out which of the pictures showed my uncle Ali with the moustache and so forth, was both useless and prescribed. It may be possible for Germans to learn English that way – I don’t know.

Two more marathon photos. I seem to have captured a running blogger here – see The Running Company, picture at top, possibly Matthias Oberth.