Books
Right or wrong: no views
Hans Keller
Collins German Dictionary .(Collins Standard Edition £9.95, with thumb index £11.50) Collins Dictionary? As distinct from Langenscheidt's Encyclopaedic Dictionary? Would the apostrophe have been all that encyclopaedic? Not that the point would be worth making if there weren't other signs ot grammatical indifference, to put it. mildly. Though 'full grammatical and syntactic information is given', almost the first thing we see is that 'regional usages are featured; American usage given; special treatment allotted to phrasal verbs.' American usage are given, special treatment are allotted? Could not four Senior Editors, six Editors and 17 Compilers have noticed something amiss, some of them, especially the grammar-conscious German lot? One's immediate, unfavourable prejudice is not wholly unjustified, even though as a whole, the work is an impressive achievement, intermittently conscientious.
American usage; let us try one or two important test cases — such as the transitive 'protest' in the sense of 'protest against', which makes it possible for a defendant to protest his innocence, while the prosecuting attorney protests his plea of not guilty. Not a word; there is no differentiation between English and American usage, though 'prottest decision' is given as an example of the verb's transitive use. What about American verbs which do not exist in English English? They don't exist in this dictionary either: there is no entry for 'concertize, which is well-established, or 'privatize', which is not, but which is old enough to have penetrated our own language within the last 12 months.
Not that you can depend on finding every English word: there is no trace, for instance, of 'problemist' and 'problematist', though they can be found in both the Concise Oxford Dictionary and indeed Langenscheidt, which is the best EnglishGerman and German-English dictionary I know. The smaller Collins cannot, of course, hope to rival it; but I can't see any reason for the omission of any word that can be found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. As for those 'regional usages', 'Gschaftlhu ber' (busybody), `gschamig' (bashful), and `Gscherte(r)' (oversimplifyingly translated as 'idiot') are described as 'informal' Austrianisms, whereas they are, in fact, dialect. The Austrian `Jause', moreover, is mistranslated: 'break (for a snack)'. `Jause' is the light afternoon meal we call 'tea', the beverage normally being coffee. If you wish to use the word for whatever you may be eating in mid-morning, you would have to qualify it as `Zehnuhrjause' — the precise equivalent of elevenses, except that the Austrians seem to be getting up an hour earlier. Needless to add, that one doesn't occur in Collins — though it would have helped to define and differentiate lause'. In any case, the 'break' introduces an utter irrelevancy: there are plenty of 'people who regularly partake of both a `Zehnuhrjause' and a ',liaise' without doing anything in between, except for having lunch.
'Elevenses' itself is simply explained as a second breakfast, without its proper, High German equivalent being listed — 'Gabelfriihstiick'. You can, admittedly, find the word in the German-English section where, however, it is mistranslated as 'buffet lunch, fork lunch', whereas the Sprach-Brockhaus defines it as a 'warm meal in mid-morning', which itself is slightly misleading, since the term's .denotation easily extends to cold elevenses: but at least this German dictionary gets the time of day (Vormittag) right.
It would be unfair to suggest that Collins leaves all problems unsolved; there are, in fact, novel solutions. Take old 'Schadenfreude', so untranslatable a word that it has been incorporated into English and duly decapitalised, though the aforementioned English dictionary inconsistently italicises it — as opposed to kindergarten, whose deeapitalised version appears in Roman. Now, if we have to translate Schadenfreude, we invariably say 'malicious joy', and our English dictionary does indeed describe it as 'malicious enjoyment of others' misfortunes'. Collins adds a new, . important connotation — Strictly speaking. 'Schadenfreude' should have been translated. additionally, as 'schadenfreude'i and vice versa: this 'dimension is treated with utter inconsistency. For instance, while 'snob' is translated as 'Snob', and vice versa, 'ersatz' is translated as 'Ersatz', but 'Ersatz' is not translated as 'ersatz'. 'Kindergarten', on the other hand. is listed both ways — as is 'song' —but wrongly. That is to say. Collins tells us that the Germanised word 'Song' means 'song': it doesn't. The fact is that just as the English mistranslated 'Lied' when they assimilated it in their language, the Germans mistranslated 'song'.
In German, a 'Song' is a. hit tune, while in English, a 'lied' is a 'German song or poem of ballad kind'. Collins rightly translates 'song' as 'Lied' and 'Lied' as 'song': if each language had kept to its own word, all confusion, would have been avoided and nothing would have been lost, since in their respective languages, the two terms mean exactly the same thing. As it is, the Germans' don't know what the English are talking about when they use the word 'lied', and the English don't know what the Germans are talking about when they use the word 'Song'. Nor, incidentally, was there any need for the wartime assimilation of 'ersatz': why not simply say 'substitute'?
Why not indeed confine oneself to assimilating untranslatabilities? 'Fair', for example, has been a German word for ages, and the post-war occupation has produced many new Anglicisms, such as 'frustrieren' for 'frustrate': Collins lists them both. But , whereas 'wennschon.' is realistically translated as `so what?', 'so what' is, unforgivably, not translated as 'wennschon', but, forgivably, as '(na) und'?.. The difference between `wennschon' and '(na) und?' parallels that between `so what?' and 'what of it?': there is no justification for omitting • either.
And while 'charlatan' is translated as `Scharlatan' and vice versa, the work does not make use of this concept when it attempts to translate the most untranslatable German word of them all — which, moreover, English never assimilated, probably because of its pronounciation: 'Hoch• stapler'. 'Confidence trickster, con man' and 'fraud' is all we get, so that we lose one of the HOchstapler's essential character traits — his pretending to be rich and/or highly qualified, his assuming a higher position. In fact, when Collins comes to translate 'impostor', 'Hochstapler' is given as a translation, as is 'Hochstapeler for imposture': why not the other way round? When we look up 'Hochstapelei% all we get is 'fraud, swindle, con trick'.
Imposture is, of course, a central element' in all charlatanism, and I would go.so far as to suggest that the most natural translation, however incomplete, of 'Hochstapler is, in fact, 'charlatan'. Let me hasten to add that Collins is not alone in disregarding this possibility; the small Langenscheidt, for • example. simply puts 'swindler', and the big Langenscheidt makes him a 'fashionably dressed swindler', thereby at least implying some sartorial imposture. Every Hochstapier is a confidence trickster and swindler,, but there are countless types of con men and swindlers without a trace of Hochstapelei.
I hope it will be noted that this review is designed to be ruthlessly objective: every • single criticism is either utterly relevant or wrong, and opinion plays no part —not even in my unprecedented translation of 1-lochstapler'. What is most important to realise is that like every other dictionary I know, Collins is capable of going wrong where, as a matter of sheer logical principle, it should not have gone wrong, where systematic consistency is a must which — with sufficient clerical help — could easily have been followed: if x (sometimes) means y, y (sometimes) means x, and there is no excuse for any exclusion due to nonobservance of this principle.
Inevitably. One's concentration on such shortcomings produces a slight imbalance. in that the dictionary's virtues do not receive comparable attention. In general, it can be said that downright mistakes are exceptionally few when one compares the work with any other effort of the same size — and size is an important consideration: since denotations and connotations tend to overlap as between the languageS, especially those of abstract nouns and verbs, a mere short-list of possible translations will readily harm, the reader's total impression of the meaning of a word.
As my penultimate example, let me take a word I have just used,— 'shortcoming(s). Collins simply gives 'Manger and 'Fehler'. The big Langenscheidt, on the other hand, lists no fewer than seven translations, the first of which is the most literal and often the best — `Unzulanglichkeie. But if you only have room for one or two, the least general won't do. In this sense, then, there is original sin in every but the largest possible dictionary. At the in1c time, there seems little excuse for inconsistent omissions: 'secession' refers to 'U.S. History', but `Sezession' does not refer to German and Austrian history. .
Previous page
