Hello my lovely cyber bloggers! Long time
has passed since my last blog entry. Almost everybody has presented their group
presentations and I was impressed by the variety of different themes. As you
may remember, in my group I talked about a German broadsheet “DER SPIEGEL” and
I said that in German news it is hardly to find bilingual features. However,
this is actually untrue. The more I learn about “Cyber culture in the bilingual
cyber space” the more I start to realize that the German language contains a
bound of bilingual features and I use them frequently without thinking:
|
English
|
German
|
|
e-mail
|
E-Post
|
|
monitor
|
Bildschrim
|
|
printer
|
Drucker
|
|
scanner
|
Einleser, Raster
|
In the table above you just see a few
examples. Without knowing any German, you can see that the German words
are a little bit more complicated than the English ones. That is one reason why
nowadays the young Germans even don’t know the German word.
However, using English in the German language is
not as easy as you might think. Especially companies have to think carefully if
they want to use an English or a German slogan. Therefore my theme for the blog
entry is “Bilingualism in Advertisement”. I’ll show you two funny examples, as
many Germans don’t understand English slogans and translate them in many different
ways:
1. Example: "Come in and find out" (Douglas)
Douglas is a famous German perfume seller
where you can buy a range of beauty products. It’s slogan “come in and find
out” became famous, as most German thought it was challenging the customers to come
into the stores and then try to find their way out again. In 2008 the company
changed their slogan to the German sentence “Douglas macht das Leben schöner”
(Douglas makes life beautiful). By using German language again, the company
target directly Germans.
2. Example: "Drive Alive" (Mitsubishi)
The slogan “Drive alive” of the Japanese
care brand “Mitsubishi” was translated by many Germans as “Fahre lebendig”,
which means: don’t be dead when you drive a car. That is a huge contrast
compared to what the English slogan wants to tell us: feel comfortable, when
you drive a Mitsubishi. Many German misunderstood this message, as they simple
didn’t understand the English slogan.
There are many other examples where Germans
misinterpret English slogans, but I asked my self the question:
Why are so many Germans confused by reading English slogans?
Nowadays, many Germans don’t take companies
seriously any more when they only us English. Although we are open minded for
everything which comes from outside, there is the fear that we may forget our
own language and therefore our own culture.
In order to understand this let’s have a
short look at German’s history. After the second World War, during the Cold
War, West Germany had a great English influence. In particular, an American
influence, as many soldiers were based in West Germany. Speaking English were
just cooler than speaking German, which reminded us of the old Nazi regime.
However, nowadays Germany has changed and
many Germans try to protect the German language. They claim that the country’s
science and industry falls back on English jargons and technical terms. Even
between Germans, English terms are integrated (see table above). That might be
one of the reasons why everything is translated into German, as I mentioned it
during the presentation. German, as a language is very precise and has a great
functionality. It is the language of famous writers such as Heinrich Heine,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schiller etc. who had a huge influence on European
literature.
Language is fluid and reflects some how a
nation’s patriotism. English is the international language and you can’t avoid
its great impact on Germans language and convert it into “Danglish”- a mix
between English and German. Nevertheless, something has changed in the Germans’
mind since 2006, when Germany hosted the football Wold Cup. For the fist time
since 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) it was okay to fly the German flag and to
paint it on your fan. I never had seen this before- such a change.
After all, Germany has changed since 1950
and nowadays we are a multilingual country where many different cultures, such
as Turkish, Italy, Polish etc., come together. As language is vivid these
influences are noted in the German languages as well and many dialects such as
Turkis-German appears.
