Categories: seasons, words, translation
Date: 27 November 2007 23:54:31
Yesterday, my Danish clients who have an office in Germany, sent me the first Christmas card of the season. It was not exactly conventional. There is a picture of a blonde Nordic bombshell wearing angel wings and blowing a rather pouty seductive kiss. Inside there was lots of promotional blurb about what a great company theirs is and how they had made some cost savings to benefit the customer. I just hope it's not a reduction in the rates they pay their translators.
Co-incidentally, a text I was translating for this very company, had the word "vorweihnachtliche" in it. This is not too difficult - it just means "pre-Christmas" (or in this case "pre-Christmassy")... but it sounds a bit colloquial so, I thought, well, pre-Christmas is strictly Advent but I can't put Adventty. Pre-seasonal wouldn't really have worked either because, if you remove the Christmas element of the word, it didn't make it clear which season was being referred to.
Weihnachten in German literally means "consecrated nights" - so that was no help either. In the end, colloquial or not, I bunged in pre-Christmassy...I don't have all day to consider the options from every angle - although I think I did give it a reasonable amount of attention.
So November 26th - first Christmas card - season's greetings to you all...or should that be seasons' greetings...and then we've got all bases covered?