For Christmas I got a card box with “German Untranslatable Words” – “Schadenfreude”, “Kopfkino”, “Weltschmerz” and so on. But are these words really untranslatable? And how do the relevant translation tools fare when confronted with such difficult chunks?

The result shows interesting Strengths and weaknesses of the respective tools. For example, both Google and DeepL translate “Schadenfreude” simply with “Schadenfreude”. Indeed, this is a Germanism that I have noticed several times in English-language publications (“Maybe it’s just Schadenfreude”). In this respect, the translation or non-translation into English is entirely correct. Linguee and Leo.org also offer other translations: “gloat (ing)”, “malicious joy” and “mischievousness”. Not bad, even if “gloating” has not been part of my active or passive vocabulary up to now. Learned something again.

Germanisms Speaking of Germanisms: All of the tools I tried translated “Fernweh” in unison with another Germanism: “Wanderlust”. It’s not really the same. Only Leo suggested the somewhat freer but perfectly fitting “itchy feet” – that is, “itchy feet”. And for “Sitzfleisch”, translated one to one by Google and DeepL as “Seat meat”, Leo has the more appropriate “steadiness”. On the other hand, Leo also shows gaps: The nice little word “Improvement” does not even appear in the database, while the other tools with “Disimprovement” or “Aggravation” offer quite useful translations.

Overall, however, Leo seems to me to be the better source when it comes to finely chiseled vocabulary – although I still appreciate DeepL for coherent texts. It is just strange that DeepL offers different translations for upper and lower case: for “tired of life” the completely unsuitable “lifelong”, for “tired of life” the more appropriate “suicidal”. This clearly shows that DeepL was built for texts and not individual words (for the latter there is the sister service Linguee).

Such peculiarities also reflect the different technical approaches: DeepL works with statistics and neural networks, Leo – one of the oldest German-language websites ever – with user input. In this case at least, human experience still tends to beat sheer computing power.

(grh)