Categories: germany, translation
Date: 23 May 2008 15:48:53
Last week I had to plough through an official (government) document discussing the approaches for offering German tuition to immigrants. After untangling a few sentences which resembled the proverbial cat's cradle I came across this little gem:
"This target group [i.e. the immigrants] often has a so-called fossilised use of language which significantly deviates from standard usage. Expressed more simply, this means that German is used incorrectly."
I couldn't help myself; I roared with laughter. Here come the language police... I could picture these bewildered immigrants desperately trying to extricate the meaning from all the official documents they are faced with - clutching like drowning men onto the few words they recognise, madly leafing through inadequate phrase books, trying to explain their personal situation with their limited vocabulary to hard-nosed officials. When they have been pushed from office to office, they return home to discuss the trials of their day with their families in their own language and then probably have to do a bit of shopping or socialising in broken German. Their fellow immigrants (all who speak other languages) understand their attempts in German, sympathise and what's more, understand what is being communicated. After a few weeks, these people can converse relatively fluently in their own version of German. The hard-nosed officials, rather than applauding these efforts, feel that proper tuition is called for to drum these bad linguistic habits out of these would-be citizens. But before the officials do this, they write a long-winded paper on the "fossilisation" caused by the immigrants' attempts at teaching themselves the language. Probably to justify their own existence - but blithely unaware of the fact that if they would only phrase things more simply, the poor immigrant (and translator, come to that) might have more than half a chance of understanding what was going on.