E-ging Solutions is a world-leading Shanghai translation company with specialties in German translation.
Due to Germany’s geographic location in the heart of Europe, the country’s geopolitical importance in global affairs, and the fact that Germany is one of the world’s largest economies, one might expect to come across the German language on a more frequent basis.
However, due to the fact that Germany did not become a country until 1871, the country did not colonize foreign lands on the scale of its neighbors — France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Russia — and therefore, the German language is not as widespread as the mother tongues of those countries.
Nonetheless, the German language plays an important role in global affairs, and you probably use German words more commonly than you think.
Here are eight interesting facts about the German language and German translation:
German is the official language of Germany, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, and it is the most widely spoken language in the European Union. Besides having official language status in those three countries, German is also spoken by people in Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Baltic states, Eastern France, and Northern Italy. With over 40% of the world’s translation demand in the European Union, German translation is becoming increasingly important.
When an English-speaking person listens to a German speaker, it may at first be difficult to imagine any relationship between the two languages. However, they actually come from the same language family, share many features, and have many cognates (words that are the same in both languages). In fact the pop culture in Germany uses so many English words that the German people are able to learn English fairly rapidly.
The descendants of German immigrants comprise the United States’ largest ancestry group. In fact, over 45 million Americans (about one out of every seven people in the U.S.) claim German ancestry. While Germans have been immigrating to North America since the 1600s, the majority came in the 1800s during a time of political upheaval in Europe. The majority of German immigrants to the U.S. settled in the Midwest.
German culture has had a huge influence on the culture of the U.S. From Christmas trees and the Easter Bunny to the German-style castles at Disneyland, many aspects of Americana have their roots in Germany. Kindergarten is also a German-born institution that has been adopted almost universally in the United States.
German cuisine has been widely adopted in the United States as well. Some common foods in the U.S. that originated in Germany include bratwurst, sauerkraut, pretzels, and frankfurters.
Many of the U.S.’s largest and most well-known companies were founded by German immigrants. Boeing, Heinz, Pfizer, Kohler, and Levi Strauss are all companies that were named after their German-American founders. North American breweries that were founded by German-Americans include Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Yeungling, Schlitz, and Miller.
There are a number of aspects of the German language that differ from the English language, which can make speaking correct English difficult for German learners. For instance, German is an inflected language which means the function of the sentence dictates how the parts of speech are understood. There is also a great deal of disparity between the tenses used in English to impart a specific meaning and the tenses used in German for the same situations.
The German language is notorious for having extensive compund words. Instead of inventing a word for something complex or abstract, the German language will take a lengthy description of the object and turn it into a single word. Imagine if we didn’t have a word for “rainbow”, and instead used, “archintheskyofmanycolorsthatareareflectionofthesunlight”. One example of a compound German word is “freundschaftsbezeigungen”, which literally means “demonstrations of friendship.”
Being classified as one of the world’s major languages, German is a very popular item for translation services. There are significant challenges for translators, mostly due to word choice, so it is important to make sure you have translators who speak both langauges as if they were native speakers of each.
As the European Union’s influence on the global stage continues to expand, the demand for German translation is expected to rise.
