Translate German To English Quotes

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

In her usual manner, Merkel spoke in German. It is worth pointing out, however, that before the translator had an opportunity to convert her statements to English, Obama gave the chancellor and the press a big smile, saying, ‘I think what she said was good. I’m teasing.’ The laughter in the room drowned out the sounds of the cameras clicking and flashing, with Merkel’s giggle and smile among the loudest.

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Don't pursue happiness! Life is as short as a sigh. The dust of people that were once famous turn with the reddish clay on the wheel you are looking at. The universe is a fata morgana; life is a dream.

For Sayonara, literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking Farewell. Farewell is a father's good-by. It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While Good-by ('God be with you') and Adios say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. Good-by is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's good-by. But Sayonara says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.

Be quiet, pain and sorrow! Let me find a remedy. I have to live, as once dead there is no memory. And I want to see my love and be with her. And I want to remember our being together.

I, however, was perfectly aware of my beauty. I considered it a skill, alongside speaking French, English, Italian and German. It was a language of its own, in a way. One that translated well in different circumstances.

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.

Our life is as short as a raging fire: flames the passer-by soon forgets, ashes the wind blows away. A man's life.

One can no more set fire to the sea, than convince people of the dangers of happiness - And yet, we know that though the smallest shock is fatal to the filled up bottle, that shock will not break the empty one.

God is great!" That shout from the mosque seems like a grand lamentation. Five times a day the earth seems to groan against its indifferent creator!

According to legend, because he spoke little English, von Steuben relied on a translator to chew out the men, frequently yelling, “Over here! Swear at him for me!” when his insults in French and German failed to achieve the desired results.

As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master’s thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton’s math Silently along its path.

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: Gretchen: "Wilhelm, where is the turnip?" Wilhelm: "She has gone to the kitchen." Gretchen: "Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?" Wilhelm. "It has gone to the opera.

God, you have paved our path with a thousand invisible stumbling stones and you have said: woe betide those that stumble! You see all and you know all. Nothing happens without your consent, so how can you hold us responsible for our failures? Can you blame me that I object to this?

The creator of stars, heaven and earth surpassed himself when he also created pain. Lips like rubies, delicious-smelling hair, blooming flowers, how many of you are already buried in earthy soil?

We have this word in German, Sachlichkeit, which is most closely translated in English as “objectivity.” With Sachlichkeit, we can separate someone’s opinions or idea from the person expressing that idea. A German debate is a demonstration of Sachlichkeit. When I say “I totally disagree,” I am debating Erin’s position, not disapproving of her. Since we were children, we Germans have learned to exercise Sachlichkeit. We believe a good debate brings more ideas and information than we could ever discover without disagreement. For us, an excellent way to determine the robustness of a proposal is to challenge it.

I want to type one of my books into a free online translation website, and convert it from English to German and then publish the results as an exercise in the absurd.

Strange is the riddle of this life of ours! Who knows the meaning of the heavenly powers? Great Caesar's wounds bleed yearly in the rose, And flower-like ladies turn again to flowers.

Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on. I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.” Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.

You already speak German; you just don't know it yet.

all German-language newspapers in the United States were required to give English translations of anything they printed about the government.

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?” Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.” Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?” Wilhelm: “It has gone to the opera.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: “Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip? “Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen. “Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? “Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.

Knobloch is a translator, writer, and producer. She has been living in the US for four years and translates fiction and nonfiction for AmazonCrossing and individual clients. Fatal Puzzle is her first fiction translation from her native German to English. Julia’s documentaries on explorers, adventure

For a translator, the supreme authority should be the author's personal style. But most translators obey another authority: that of the conventional version of “good French” (or good German, good English, et cetera), namely, the French (the German, et cetera) we learn in school. The translator considers himself the ambassador from that authority to the foreign author. That is the error: every author of some value transgresses against “good style,” and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d'être) of his art. The translator's primary effort should be to understand that transgression. This is not difficult when it is obvious, as for example with Rabelais, or Joyce, or Celine. But there are authors whose transgression against “good style” is subtle, barely visible, hidden, discreet; as such, it is not easy to grasp. In such a case, it is all the more important to do so.

The translation is designedly very literal, and the nature of German prose is such that an English rendering which aims—as this does—at close correspondence rather than happy paraphrase, can hardly avoid displaying at times a certain stiffness in the joints; but I have thought it right to reproduce Rilke’s oddities of expression and punctuation, which are no less curious in the original than they must seem here; and never to succumb to the temptation to write pretty-sounding English just because it is a poet that speaks. Rilke is a master of the unlikely, but poetically true, word; and a cunning employer of alliteration, personification, and hypallage.

I translated the laws which pertain to our people into German and plan to read them aloud in our next community meeting. Whenever impudent people have to be kept in order, they like to refer to English freedom. However, in the future they will be confronted with the actual laws and will be forced to concede that English laws do not encourage undue licence and libertinism.

God GOD, noun [Saxon god; German gott; Dutch god; Swedish and Danish gud; Gothic goth or guth; Pers. goda or choda; Hindoo, khoda, codam. As this word and good are written exactly alike in Saxon, it has been inferred that God was named from his goodness. But the corresponding words in most of the other languages, are not the same, and I believe no instance can be found of a name given to the Supreme Being from the attribute of goodness. It is probably an idea too remote from the rude conceptions of men in early ages. Except the word Jehovah, I have found the name of the Supreme Being to be usually taken from his supremacy or power, and to be equivalent to lord or ruler, from some root signifying to press or exert force. Now in the present case, we have evidence that this is the sense of this word, for in Persic goda is rendered dominus, possessor, princeps, as is a derivative of the same word. See Cast. Lex. Col. 231.] 1. The Supreme Being; Jehovah; the eternal and infinite spirit, the creator, and the sovereign of the universe. God is a spirit; and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4. 2. A false god; a heathen deity; an idol. Fear not the gods of the Amorites. Judges 6. 3. A prince; a ruler; a magistrate or judge; an angel. Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people. Exodus 22. Psalm 97. [Gods here is a bad translation.] 4. Any person or thing exalted too much in estimation, or deified and honored as the chief good. Whose god is their belly. Philippians 3.

Sonnet of Languages Turkish is the language of love, Spanish is the language of revolution. Swedish is the language of resilience, English is the language of translation. Portuguese is the language of adventure, German is the language of discipline. French is the language of passion, Italian is the language of cuisine. With over 7000 languages in the world, Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet. But you can rest assured of one thing, Every language does something the very best. Each language is profoundly unique in its own way. When they come together, they light the human way.

The words schlecht and schlimm both mean “bad” in German, but how do you know when to use one or the other? When do we use fleuve or rivière in French? How do we render the French esprit into English? We ought not merely translate each word on its own, but must rather evoke the sense of how they fit the whole of the passage. But how can that be done, if languages are indeed so different? These differences aren’t trivial, mind you– Erasmus wrote an entire treatise on why he rendered the Greek logos into the Latin sermo in his translation of the New Testament. Translating word for-word is simply inadequate

If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.

Vischer’s idea of a back and forth between projecting the self and internalizing the world—what he called a “direct continuation of the external sensation into an internal one”—influenced generations of philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe his radical new concept, he used the German word Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. It is pretty shocking to realize that empathy is barely a hundred years old, about the same age as X-rays and lie-detector tests.

Much of what has been written about that moment homes in on the word “conscience.” Luther declared, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He continued, “To go against conscience is neither safe nor right.”1 But so many historians have conflated our modern ideas about conscience with Luther’s very different ideas about it that we have accepted a deeply mistaken idea about what Luther meant, and therefore about what his stand at Worms meant. Of course Luther never said the English word “conscience”; that word is a translation from his German and Latin. The words he used, usually translated as “conscience,” cannot perfectly be translated as what we today mean by that word. The German word he used, Gewissen, really means “knowing.” And the Latin word, conscientia, means “with knowing.

contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple — it’s just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott— simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers.

One of those settlers was Normandy-born and ornately named J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, who embarked for America in 1754, purchased an estate in Pennsylvania, and married the daughter of an American merchant. In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782 in English and translated soon after into French, Crevecoeur described his adoptive country and his countrymen in the most flattering terms: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world... Here a man is free as he ought to be... An American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence – this is an American. It was partly through such fervent testimonies from men like Crevecoeur, and from foreigners like the even more famous Frenchman de Tocqueville and the less famous German Francis Lieber, that America gained its reputation abroad, because third-party

When The Artificial Silk Girl first appeared in English in 1933, it was part of an ongoing cultural exchange between Germany and Great Britain. But it was not only the fact that Keun’s novel had been a bestseller in Germany that prompted its instant translation; it was also one of the last accounts of everyday German life before the Nazis came to power. By the time the English translation appeared in Great Britain, Keun’s books had already been banned in Germany. Thus star translator Basil Creighton made a special point of emphasizing the political environment encountered by Keun’s Artificial Silk Girl in Berlin, adding passages in the translation that were designed specifically to help readers position Keun’s novel in the context of then-recent German political developments.

The German word Bildung also exists in Scandinavian countries but it cannot be translated easily into English. It refers to the shaping of a human individual’s personality, behaviour and moral attitude through their upbringing, environment and education. Neither education nor formation suffice to cover the comprehensive and complex meaning of the word. Bildung is a much broader concept, encompassing knowledge, judgement, a broad cultural and political orientation, an understanding of science and technology, and a cultivation of the fine arts.

The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Horst was born precisely when Konrad was think- ing about Rechnender Raum for the first time (the common translation into English is Calculating Space but the phrase in his native German carries a lot more cognitive weight than its plain English counterpart, in light of the ideas treated in Zuse’s piece: calculation, computation of nature, space and/or the universe).

Freeman had exercised what the dapper man called his best talent: Sitzfleisch. Freeman had explained that this German word had no equivalent in English, and literally translated as “Sitflesh.” It meant the ability to sit still and work quietly.

Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated.

German words: Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.

He proposed that, apart from and even surpassing the rule that we are governed in our actions by pleasure, there is a parallel urge to dispel life energy and thus tension—and that this drive can be found at the root of war neuroses and the neurotic’s compulsion to repeat unpleasant situations. Specifically, he called this a “death drive,” or thanatos. Thus, beyond pleasure lay the even more extreme reward of oblivion.13 Although intriguing, Freud’s idea of an instinctive urge toward negation or annihilation seemed paradoxical, and never really caught on … except as it was reformulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the late 1950s. Lacan’s French had an advantage that Freud’s German lacked, specifically the word jouissance, meaning painful pleasure or pleasurable pain—literally something “beyond pleasure” that takes over and drives a neurotic or someone who has been traumatized. The simplistic examples commonly given of jouissance include an orgasm so extreme that it causes agony, or the erotic pleasures of sadomasochistic acts. But a better analogy would be addiction, the compulsion to repeat an act (taking a drug, for instance) that cannot be resisted yet no longer gives much pleasure because it is more about the temporary dissipation or release of unpleasure.14 There is no equivalent word in English either. In reference to Lacan, jouissance is usually translated as “enjoyment,” but it needs to be understood that there may be something deeply ambivalent or even repellent about this particular kind of enjoyment. It is an enjoyment we do not want, a weird mix of excitement and pain, reward and regret. The concept of jouissance, as the underlying energy driving human compulsions, including pathological compulsions and obsessions treated in psychotherapy, became so central for Lacan that late in his career he made the provocative statement that jouissance is the “only substance” psychoanalysis deals with.15 Lacan might better have said “force” and not substance. Later Lacanian thinkers have likened jouissance to the warping of space in a gravitational field. The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious reward bends our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessional behavior, and on some level all behavior.

the white tents. 17. Two views of The Wild West in Paris, igo5. Colonel Cody, a Hawkeye by birth, is personally lionized by the Parisians, and his unique exhibition, so full of historical and dramatic interest, made a wonderful impression upon the susceptible French public. The twenty lessons I took in French, at the Berlitz School of Languages, London, only gave me a faint idea of what the language was like, but as I was required to make my lectures and announcements in French, I had my speeches translated, and was coached in their delivery by Monsieur Corthesy, editeur, le journal de Londres. Well, I got along pretty fair, considering that I did not know the meaning of half the words I was saying. Anyway it amused them, so I was satisfied. I honestly believe that more people came in the side show in Paris to hear and laugh at my "rotten" French than anything else, and when I found that a certain word or expression excited their risibilities, I never changed it. I can look back now and see where some of my own literal translations were very funny. Colonel Cody's exhibition is unique in many ways, and might justly be termed a polyglot school, no less than twelve distinct languages being spoken in the camp, viz.: Japanese, Russian, French, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Spanish, Holland, Flemish, Chinese, Sioux and English. Being in such close contact every day, we were bound to get some idea of each other's tongue, and all acquire a fair idea of English. Colonel Cody is, therefore, entitled to considerable credit for disseminating English, and thus preserving the entente cordiale between nations. 18. Entrance to the Wild West, Champs de Mars, Paris, Igo5. The first place of public interest that we visited in Paris was the Jardin des Plantes (botanical and zoological garden) and le Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. The zoological collection would suffer in comparison with several in America I might mention, but the Natural History Museum is very complete, and is, to my notion, the most artistically arranged of any museum I have visited. Le Palais du Trocadero, which was in sight of our grounds and facing the

Throughout the Germanic-speaking region, the dwarf is designated by words such as Middle High German zwerc, Old Norse dvergr, and Old English dweorg, but the poets, writers, and clerics systematically applied this term to all the denizens of the lower mythology. “Dwarf” becomes an umbrella term to designate what was originally a very diverse array of individuals, but by systematically examining the medieval German lexicon, for example, and especially that of the glosses written on the margins or between the lines of Latin books, we can name these creatures. Zwerc translates “faun,” “satyr,” “silenus” and “hairy one” (pilosus).

Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather’s memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress.

Even those who know the chronology of missions history still sometimes cite Carey as the "father" because of the length of his ministry in India (forty-one years), because of his commitment to Bible translation, or because he was an English speaker. However, when Carey arrived in India in November 1793, the German Protestant missionary Friedrich Schwartz already was in the forty-third of what would eventually be forty-eight years of ministry in India. Furthermore, the first Protestant missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Plutschau, translated the New Testament into Tamil by 1715, less than a decade after their arrival in India. There were several well-known English-speaking missionaries before Carey, including John Eliot (1604-1690) and David Brainerd (1718-1747). In short, looking at the pure chronology of missions, it is difficult to see why Carey is considered the "first" or the "father" of modern missions. However, this is why missions history must be seen not simply through the lens of chronos but also through the lens of kairos. William Carey can be referred to as the Father of Modern Missions, but not because of any of the reasons that are normally offered. William Carey is the father of modern missions because he stepped into a kairos moment, which stimulated the founding of dozens of new voluntary missionary societies and propelled hundreds of new missionaries out onto the field in what became the largest missions mobilization in history.

ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,

Marx’s ideas were spreading at last. By 1871 a second edition of Capital was needed. A Russian translation appeared in 1872 – Marx was very popular among Russian revolutionaries – and a French translation soon followed. Though Capital was not translated into English during Marx’s lifetime (like his other books, it was written in German) Marx’s growing reputation, even among the untheoretical English, was indicated by his inclusion in a series of pamphlets on ‘Leaders in Modern Thought’.

She is a character in a novel, he says. The product of a male author’s imagination. This Defoe, is he French? No, I believe he is English. The edition I gave you is translated into German from that language.

At Elxis – At Home in Greece, we take you step by step through purchasing a house in Greece. Start by clicking on ‘Properties’ and then on the region where you want to buy a home. Our team of experts can advise on your investment, helping you view properties, prepare the required documents, and negotiate the price. We guide you through the process in your desired language: English, Dutch, Greek, or German – so that you spend less time translating and more times turning your dream home in Greece into reality.

Hacking cites another example of the changing meaning of probability.12 Galileo, making explicit use of the word probabilità, referred to Copernicus’s theory of the earth revolving around the sun as “improbable,” because it contradicted what people could see with their own eyes—the sun revolving around the earth. Such a theory was improbable because it did not meet with approval. Less than a century later, using a new (but not yet the newest) meaning, the German scholar Leibniz described the Copernican hypothesis as “incomparably the most probable.” For Leibniz, Hacking writes, “probability is determined by evidence and reason.”13 In fact, the German word, wahrscheinlich, captures this sense of the concept well: it translates literally into English as “with the appearance of truth.

One attractive, unique feature of the worship services in Georgia was their use of hymns, facilitated by Wesley’s publication of A Collection of Psalms and Hymns in 1737, the first English hymn book published in America. None of the hymns are by Charles, who had not yet been tapped by his poetic muse. These texts, many translated by John from the German, express the heart of a pietism grounded in Scripture and elucidate the themes that are central to Wesley’s spiritual quest—utter dependency upon grace, the centrality of love, and the desire for genuine fire to inflame his cold heart (see Zinzendorf’s bridal song of the soul).

Let us begin with the German expression aus dem Amerikanischen, which graces virtually every book or article translated from texts penned by authors that are perceived as “American.”24 What exactly is going on here? “Is ‘American’”—according to Josef Joffe, the American-educated editor of the German weekly Die Zeit—“pronounced differently from ‘English’? That also applies to ‘Austrian’ and ‘Swiss.’”25 But it would never occur to anybody in America, Canada, or Britain to label “a Gottfried Keller translation ‘Translated from the Swiss’ or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as having been ‘translated from the Austrian.’”26 “Why do the Germans want to force a language on Americans that they don’t even speak?

For example, as a young twenty-four-year-old at the company he was asked to collaborate on a record player. The norm at the time was to cover the turntable in a solid wooden lid or even to incorporate the player into a piece of living room furniture. Instead, he and his team removed the clutter and designed a player with a clear plastic cover on the top and nothing more. It was the first time such a design had been used, and it was so revolutionary people worried it might bankrupt the company because nobody would buy it. It took courage, as it always does, to eliminate the nonessential. By the sixties this aesthetic started to gain traction. In time it became the design every other record player followed. Dieter’s design criteria can be summarized by a characteristically succinct principle, captured in just three German words: Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better. A more fitting definition of Essentialism would be hard to come by.

Dieter’s design criteria can be summarized by a characteristically succinct principle, captured in just three German words: Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better. A more fitting definition of Essentialism would be hard to come by.

Jung named the four functions intuition, thinking, feeling, and sensation. (We are, of course, dealing with the English terms used in translation, which are not as expressive as the original German.) Everybody has all four functions, but there is a tendency to favor one. The intuitive person tends to look for connections, patterns, and relationships between different objects and people. He or she tends to see how a pattern will work itself out in human society, in individual psychology, or even in the physical organism. The thinking person looks for what makes sense according to deductive reasoning and rational thought. The pattern does not matter as much as the logic behind the process. The feeling person does not care whether the experience makes sense or fits a pattern, but what it feels like emotionally. (Unfortunately, English is a little ill-prepared for these concepts. “Feeling” is used to describe emotional experiences, physical sensations, and intuitive “hunches.”) Sensation people are somewhat more difficult to recognize or define. They do not look for the pattern, the logic, or the feeling, but learn from the sensation of what they are doing. These people are the ones who have to learn from experience. Theirs is a hands-on knowledge, a physical feeling of “what it felt like,” which helps them to proceed from one experience to the next. They have a hard time trying to explain why they did something or what somebody else should do; they would rather just show you how to do it. And if they have not had the experience, they will not attempt to explain it. The four functions match the four elements: intuition (fire), thinking (air), feeling (water), and sensation (earth). Jung laid out the four functions on a cross, as follows: Jung found that each person tended to have a dominant function, a secondary function that he or she was fairly good at using to supplement the first, a third function that could support the others, and an “inferior function” that was difficult to grapple with or use with ease. This function was the Achilles’ heel of the psyche. On the cross, the inferior was always the one opposite the dominant function. The two supporting functions were on either side. In addition to these four functions, Jung identified a fifth which he called the “transcendent function.” He placed this in the center of the cross, or quarternio, like the quintessence. This function was not immediately available to ordinary consciousness, but through special development or critical experiences, it could be brought to bear on solving the issues of life. This function tended to look above and go beyond ordinary functioning with the four regular faculties of the psyche. These, after all, tended toward domination and inferiority. The “transcendent function” was so named because it jumped above these prejudices and brought in new solutions for the soul. Jung identified this function with the “active imagination,” or the imaginative faculty actively used.

Given the centrality of Hebrew to the Zionists’ sense of accomplishment, the abandonment of Hebrew in the United States was bound to create a rift, a sense of otherness. And on a much more utilitarian level, American Jews’ decision not to learn Hebrew means that they have access to a very thin slice of Israeli culture. Everything that they know or feel about Israeli society is fed by a cultural trickle mediated by others who decide what should and should not be translated. If a citizen of France or Germany spoke no English, how deep an understanding could they possibly have of the United States, its culture, its struggles, and its nuances? Very little. No Frenchman or German who did not speak English could be said to understand America in any meaningful way, and any advice they offered would be ignored, swatted away like a pesky fly that, while annoying, was of no import at all.

three German words: Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.

As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself. He leaves the German Sein or Being more or less as it is, but when it comes to talking about the questioner for whom its Being is in question (i.e. me, a human), he strenuously avoids talk of humanity, man, mind, soul or consciousness, because of the scientific, religious or metaphysical assumptions such words conceal. Instead, he speaks of ‘Dasein’, a word normally meaning ‘existence’ in a general way, and compounded of da (there) and sein (to be). Thus, it means ‘there-being’, or ‘being-there’. The effect is at once disconcerting and intriguing. Reading Heidegger, and feeling (as one often does) that you recognise an experience he is describing, you want to say, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ But the word itself deflects you from this interpretation; it forces you to keep questioning. Just getting into the habit of saying Dasein takes you halfway into Heidegger’s world. It is so important a term that English translators tend to leave it in the original German; an early partial French translation by Henry Corbin rendered it as ‘réalité humaine’, which created another layer of confusion.

For non-German readers, it should be added, some of the awkwardness is an artefact of translation. German welcomes monumental word constructions, but in English they tend to come out as long hyphenated lines, trundling along like mismatched railway carriages. The Question of Being, for example, is an elegant Seinsfrage in German. But even German cannot comfortably accommodate Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-(der-Welt) als Sein-bei (innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden), or ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-(the-world) as being-together-with (beings encountered within the world)’.

In 1522, William Tyndale began translating the Greek New Testament into English. Tyndale had the audacity to actually translate the term ekklesia rather than superimpose the widely accepted German term kirche. Instead of church, he used the term congregation. If that wasn’t offensive enough, the Greek text led him to use elder instead of priest and repent instead of do penance.11

By the end of that century, Europe saw an enormous shift as peasants left the countryside, cities expanded, and an industrial working class was formed.1 The German social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies described this as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or what is typically translated in English as “community” and “society.”2

Generations of Lutheran pastors in my own denomination, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, were taught the rudiments of their theological confession by Francis Pieper. The lectures that formed his text, Christian Dogmatics, were delivered in German in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, translated into English, and then, printed and reprinted until the present. The three volumes comprise more than 1600 pages, eight of which address issues relating to the two realms.

Throughout the unceasing course of human history, there have been a small number of revolutionary ideas that have served to define the nature and shape of an entire era and people. These ground-breaking ideas have been neither parochially limited, nor culturally demarcated in scope, but rather have served as meta-cultural, trans-geographical ideological principles that have assisted in guiding and molding the direction and purpose of entire civilizations and epochs in history. Such world-views are weltanschauung, a German word which has no English equivalent. The closest translation is perhaps the phrase "world-perspective", or a “world-view”. It is a way of perceiving reality, a way of seeing. A weltanschauung can be of either a positive and life-enhancing nature, while others can be devastatingly destructive. Some of the meta-ideas responsible for such civilizational transformation have included the world-altering ideas of theism, science, secularism, materialism, Marxism, hierarchy, equality, and democracy, among others. Of all the known ideological world-views to have arisen in human memory, the ancient principle of Dharma (“Natural Law” one can say) is by far the most important, universal, compelling, and surprisingly least known in our age, of all weltanschauung. It is a world-view that has shaped entire intercontinental civilizations in the ancient past, and that is still making its presence known today. It is also the one world-view destined to shape the future of our new global civilization in the 21 st Century and beyond. (p. 39)

Throughout the unceasing course of human history, there have been a small number of revolutionary ideas that have served to define the nature and shape of an entire era and people. These ground-breaking ideas have been neither parochially limited, nor culturally demarcated in scope, but rather have served as meta-cultural, trans-geographical ideological principles that have assisted in guiding and molding the direction and purpose of entire civilizations and epochs in history. Such world-views are weltanschauung, a German word which has no English equivalent. The closest translation is perhaps the phrase "world-perspective", or a “world-view”. It is a way of perceiving reality, a way of seeing. A weltanschauung can be of either a positive and life-enhancing nature, while others can be devastatingly destructive. Some of the meta-ideas responsible for such civilizational transformation have included the world-altering ideas of theism, science, secularism, materialism, Marxism, hierarchy, equality, and democracy, among others. Of all the known ideological world-views to have arisen in human memory, the ancient principle of Dharma (“Natural Law” one can say) is by far the most important, universal, compelling, and surprisingly least known in our age, of all weltanschauung. It is a world-view that has shaped entire intercontinental civilizations in the ancient past, and that is still making its presence known today. It is also the one world-view destined to shape the future of our new global civilization in the 21 st Century and beyond. (p. 39)

One might expect, as a result, that the history of utility theory and decision-making would be dominated by Bernoullians, especially since Daniel Bernoulli was such a well-known scientist. Yet such is not the case: most later developments in utility theory were new discoveries rather than extensions of Bernoulli’s original formulations. Was the fact that Bernoulli wrote in Latin a problem? Kenneth Arrow has pointed out that Bernoulli’s paper on a new theory of measuring risk was not translated into German until 1896, and that the first English translation appeared in an American scholarly journal as late as 1954. Yet Latin was still in common usage in mathematics well into the nineteenth century; and the use of Latin by Gauss was surely no barrier to the attention that his ideas commanded. Still, Bernoulli’s choice of Latin may help explain why his accomplishments have received greater notice from mathematicians than from economists and students of human behavior. Arrow suggests a more substantive issue. Bernoulli dealt with utility in terms of numbers, whereas later writers preferred to think of it as a preference-setter: saying “I like this better than that” is not the same as saying “This is worth x utils to me.