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)

When I first moved to Fürth, in 1987, I lived in a new flat in the south part of the town. Our landlord was Hans Beck, who was famous as the inventor of Playmobil toys. He didn’t, as far as I know, own other flats. He was always very pleasant to deal with, on the few occasions we had any contact with him. He died recently, and I nearly blogged it, but only now have I realized that his obituary has appeared in English in so many papers: the New York Times, the Times, the Independent (the one I saw today) and many others. It’s also been widely blogged.

A query came up on a mailing list today from an attorney qualified in the USA who is about to have to teach something on English law. He wanted to know sources for the courts and the basics.

I will list a few sources here. I go for the briefest and simplest, because I find it easier to learn about a foreign legal system that way. This list is not exhaustive, of course.

Via Delia Venables, a lot of links can be found. Delia was a very early aficionado of law on the internet. It’s necessary to click on Primarily for students, then Resources for law students, then Introductory material. (Via Information for lawyers, you can find a list of legal newspapers and journals, too).

One of the links Delia gives is to a set of resources for school students studying A Level Law: A Level Law Notes prepared by staff at St Brendan’s Sixth Form College in Bristol. These were always useful, but they have not been updated since September 2008.

She also links to a barrister called Nik Nicol, who has elementary materials online (also in Spanish).

Two other learning sites that were new to me and look good are LoretoLore – from Loreto College in Manchester, actually a blog, so you can follow its RSS feed – and Lawbore, the site of the City University in London.

Another good place to start with the basics is Wikipedia, for example the entry on English law.

Another suggestion made on the mailing list was the site of Translegal, who have a lot of teaching resources. They publish books on International Legal English, which are used by many EFL-trained teachers.

Guardian article about the Weinereien in Berlin, where (after 8 pm at least) you pay what you want:

The Berlin Weinerei are the inadvertent brainchild of Jürgen Stumpf, who moved to the city in 1996 from the Bavarian town of Franken, where his family owns a five-hectare vineyard. He opened up a small wine shop selling his family’s wares in the rapidly emerging east of the city, and invited his nextdoor neighbour, Argentinean immigrant Mariano Goni, to cook for guests on Thursday nights.

I liked the ‘rapidly emerging east of the city’ too, and even better ‘Prenzlauer Berg, an area in the former east’.

Whatever happened to British spelling? ‘Reisling’ is traditional Grauniad, but ‘assholes’?

…sometimes there are assholes who spend the entire night here and pay €5,” said Mariano. “Especially Spanish people. …

(Mariano is from Argentina).

The New York Times understood it better:

Their owner hails from the north Bavarian region of Franconia, and more than half the wines are produced in Germany.

In criminal trials in England and Wales and the USA, the defence usually has the last word (not in every state, though). In Germany, it is the defendant in person who has the last word (sometimes along the lines of ‘I’m sorry and I won’t ever do it again’).

In an old entry in Strafprozesse und andere Ungereimtheiten, Werner Siebers tells a story where the defendant should have been forbidden from having the last word.

When three potential witnesses turn out to have emigrated to Israel and the robbed petrol station manager is ill, and on top of that the defendant has been in pre-trial detention for months without an arrest warrant, and the public prosecutor requests an acquittal and compensation (for all three defendants), it is not good for the last word to be ‘And I’m sorry we didn’t pay for the petrol’. (Both the interpreter and the defendant had been told there should be no last word by him).

Das “Letzte Wort” wurde erteilt und gegen die mit der Dolmetscherin und dem Mandanten getroffene Absprache stand dieser auf und begann, in seiner Heimatsprache Ausführungen zu machen. Als die Übersetzung kam, bin ich fast vom Stuhl gekippt. Da hat der sich doch tatsächlich dafür entschuldigt, dass man gemeinsam vergessen habe, das Benzin zu bezahlen.

Erheiterung beim Richter. Verurteilung wegen gemeinschaftlichen Tankbetruges, deshalb auch keine Haftentschädigung. Seit diesem Tag ist das “Letzte Wort” für mich das “Verhängnisvolle Wort”.

Werner Siebers has had a numnber of entries on problems with a Bulgarian interpreter in recent months.

I don’t think this spelling in the Independent is quite right, is it?

Dr Nick Plowman, a consultant oncologist at St Bartholomew’s hospital, who will oversee the treatment, said: “If you get a discreet little tumour in an awkward place, under the liver or next to the kidney, then there’s really nothing better than the Cyberknife.”