Do you understand it? (Isabella)

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.