We Are The Champions

I'm gnawing my way through excruciatingly witty ad copy today. To get through some of the bumpier spots, I've been checking out the U.S. competitors. Suddenly, I realized a big difference between U.S. and German slogans that had always bothered me on a subconscious level.

All-American slogan: "Satisfying customers for 30 years!"
Typisch deutscher Werbespruch: "Mit Erfolg seit 30 Jahren!"*

Is it just me, or do German companies come off sounding like jerks?


*"Successful for 30 years!"

Buckling Under...

Lots of work today - and more to come this weekend. But here's something to tide you over: an interesting article on managing international transactions by a Canadian lawyer. You have to register to view the article, but it doesn't take long.

He says this about language and cultural issues:

This is sometimes the biggest hurdle to overcome in an international transaction. During intense negotiations, one group may break into a foreign language, which leads the other party to suspect devious actions and bad faith. Cultural differences can often produce similar concerns: one side invites the other to join it for social activities during the negotiation process, whereas the other party prefers to remain alone. The problem is that by refusing the invitation, the party extending the invitation views the refusal as a supreme insult.

Guest Workers, Part 4

You may remember that I recently mentioned an honor killing in Berlin.

Just now, I saw the victim's picture on Deutsche Welle:


Hatin Sürücü

News Flash: German Is Germane To Germany

In the beginning, I viewed learning German as intellectual body-building: something that was good for your general form, but not all that useful. Like adding up license plate numbers while waiting at a bus stop, it was a good way to pass the time. I’d carry on conversations with myself in German, or call up girls I knew and leave messages on their answering machine in German.

When I came to Germany, I was shocked to discover that Germans actually spoke German. Deep down, I had always suspected that German was something only spoken in public. Once people went home, they shed their public persona and spoke the only real language: English.

The only real language, that is, except Spanish. Everyone knows that Mexicans speak Spanish. Except when they’re home. Then they speak English, like the rest of us. Right?

As The World Turns

It throws up these reports:

Immigration in Sweden. It appears to have some parallels to the situation in Germany.

Bloggers who bridge the culture gap. It reports in detail on Global Voices Online. This Harvard University initiative showcases bloggers, particularly from the developing world.

Guest Workers, Part 3

This is a World report about the honor killing of a Turkish-Kurdish woman in Berlin. She was allegedly shot to death by her brothers in retribution for leaving her husband by arranged marriage.

There was a similar case in the United States in the early 90s. Back then, it was the father killing his daughter for shaming the family. Again, a Kurdish family, albeit one from Iran and not Turkey.

After this earlier killing happened, I brought up the case with an Iranian friend of mine. Her response: "Well, they're peasants. My family's nothing like that."

Guest Workers, Part 2

This is an excellent report on the "border activism" of The Minuteman Project, a group President Bush, to his credit, has referred to as "vigilantes". (If you have problems playing this WMA file, just right-click, save the link address and copy it into Winamp or Windows Media Player. There is a "Play URL" option in the File menu for both programs.)

The Guardian/Observer has an article on The Minuteman Project here.

In another parallel with the mass migration of unlettered Mexicans to the U.S., The Economist recently said:

EUROPEANS' perceptions of Turkey are often shaped by the Turks they know. In Germany, these tend to be the Gastarbeiter (guest workers) who moved there in the 1960s to take up low-grade jobs that the booming post-war economy could no longer fill from the domestic labour market. Over 2m Turks came, and they were mostly honest, hard-working and religious people. But they were economic refugees, poor villagers from the east, not model citizens of Ataturk's republic.

Many of their children, though, have moved on, to become anything from prominent European parliamentarians to star European footballers. One of them even married one of the sons of Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor. It is just the sort of transformation that Ataturk would have wished for his countrymen.

Yet experience of the Gastarbeiter has left Germans in two minds about Turkish entry into the EU. Their main worry is about a massive further inflow of economic migrants. The Social Democrat-led government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is generally supportive, but the opposition Christian Democrats, led by Angela Merkel, have vowed to do everything possible to wreck Turkey's application. A federal election is due next year, with the outcome still wide open. Even Mr Kohl, the Christian Democrat chancellor who was voted out in 1998, has spoken against Turkish membership, saying that he is “convinced that Turkey will not fulfil the Copenhagen criteria”. These are the basic conditions for joining the EU, which lay down that “membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.”

Quips and Quiddities

"I'm outside Modena," W------ says. I've called her because a major account needs a translation into German. I don't work into German, but W------ does. In fact, she's been translating since I was in diapers.

"Modena?" I ask. "Where is Modena, anyway?"

"It's in Italy. Outside Bologna. You know where Bologna is?"

"No - I'm American, you know. I'm not supposed to know anything about geography."

Luckily, she laughs at this quip.

About a year ago, I wasn't so lucky. A client called, apoplectic, because I had written in one text that Allgäu was in Switzerland. And my quip failed utterly to make her laugh.

Yes, I now know it's not in Switzerland. But gimme a break, willya? I'm American. We're not supposed to know anything about geography.

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Guest workers are hitting the headlines in the U.S. I haven’t sifted through every report, but this article warns U.S. lawmakers of the very problems that caught Germany unawares. (Alas, I haven't managed to buy the full version yet. But I'll try, try again.)

The problem seems to stem from the word “guest”. In other words, the workers expect - and are expected - to leave one day. But they end up staying. In Toprak’s book, one young man says: “My mother always says, ‘One more year, then we’ll go to Turkey’. … But that’s what they always say. They always say that. Man, they’ve been saying that since I was in elementary school.” (p. 59)

Now, I’m too ill-informed to pontificate further. But I want to learn more. Most of us have been immigrants, so you might know of a good book on immigration. If so, please put it in the comments.

One caveat: if it’s not in English, I can’t afford to read it. Got to keep my edge, you know.

Young Turks

"After three days, fish and guests start to smell." – American saying

"It was a mistake for us to bring guest workers from foreign cultures into the country." - Helmut Schmidt, ex-chancellor of Germany

"We came as guest workers and 40 years later we are still guest workers. But it will change, the third generation will be German." - Recep Tuerkoglu, head of the Islamic Turkish Association

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I live under the same roof as a German-American teenager. For years, he has told me that Turkish teenagers have threatened and attacked him. Hearing this made my palms sweat. Not out of fear for him. But out of fear of what he might become.

After years of refusing to believe him, I now do. What I don’t understand is why. I hoped to find the answer in a book called “Ich bin eigentlich nicht aggressiv” (I’m not really aggressive) by Ahmet Toprak, a German social worker of Turkish descent.

This is a kind of book report about the book.

Toprak describes how 12 young men, all 3rd-generation Turkish immigrants, are socialized. Here are some tidbits:

• Many parents (2nd-generation immigrants) don’t know the difference between the various schools. For example, if their son goes to a Hauptschule (think “vo-tech”), they assume he can still become a doctor. (p. 31, p. 58)
• The kids often can’t speak German or Turkish properly. For example, until the mid-90s, Turkish kids in Bavaria had classes in Turkish so that they could be resocialized in Turkey. In other words, they were never supposed to be integrated in Germany. But can a German school prepare them for life in Turkey? (p. 58)
• Most of the kids don’t have their own rooms. One said, “My brothers and sisters do their homework at the kitchen table. And if company comes, they just don’t do any homework at all.” (p.36)
• These kids - born in Germany, raised in Germany and educated in Germany - have three-month visas. They can’t extend them because they keep committing petty crimes. But nor can they get a job with a three-month visa. (p. 40)
• They don’t have a realistic perception of Turkey. They idealize Turkey because they associate Germany with discrimination and negative experiences. They assimilate Turkey into their personality, so anyone who attacks Turkey attacks them directly. And because they’ve never lived there, they don’t have the reserve to brush off stupid insults. (p. 41)
• Intriguingly, religion is given an extremely superficial treatment in this book. In the margin, I wrote, “What is he hiding?” (p. 44)
• Honor is extremely important: “You have to be ready to go to jail for honor. You shouldn’t be ashamed of that. That’s what it’s like in Turkey. If you protect your honor, they reduce your sentence. … That’s what my Grampa said. My father said the same thing!” (p. 61)
• Honor (Ehre) consists of three different components:
  1) şeref (prestige): being seen as a good person because you do good works. (p. 45)
  2) namus (honor): honor as perceived by the outside world. There is a clear boundary between public and private. When someone oversteps the boundary, say, by insulting your mother, it is your job as a man to defend your mother ruthlessly and determinedly. A man’s namus depends on his wife’s behavior. If she doesn’t remain chaste, it’s because he’s not man enough to keep her chaste. (p. 46)
  3) saygι (respect): respect for older people, etc. (p. 47)
• Men have to respond to any challenge decisively, not pusillanimously. (p. 49)
• Masculinity is equally important. Men are not allowed to cry or appear weak. If a young man appears weak, he loses status within the family and “is no longer consulted in any decisions concerning the family.” (p. 149)
• Friendship is extremely important. No matter what your friend does, you have to stand up for him. In one case, this led to a brawl involving 35 to 50 kids in the Munich pedestrian zone in 1998. The rumble stemmed from a bet on a foosball game between a Turkish teenager and an Albanian one. The loser, who was supposed to buy the other player a beer, welched on the bet. So they decided to duke it out. Problem is, they all called their friends, who called their friends, who then called their friends. But most of them didn’t know why the fight happened: “No, I didn’t know what the reason was. I heard he needed help. I didn’t ask. … Well, what should I have said? They’ll laugh at you otherwise. You have to help your friends, no matter what.” (p. 62)
  In the fight, one boy was killed. Several were gravely injured.

Links (in German):
About a young Turkish prostitute in Germany
Young Turks as victims and perpetrators of violence
Article by Ahmet Toprak with much of the information in the book
Where Ahmet Toprak works

Flour

When I opened the door, I saw my wife frowning at two marbleized pound cakes on the counter. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You know the Turkish neighbors downstairs?” I nodded. There were four of them – two older parents in their sixties, and their two college-educated kids. “Well, we ran out of flour, so I went down there to borrow some and the father opened the door. He didn’t understand what I wanted.” She paused and pursed her lips. “He told me to come back in an hour so his daughter could interpret for him.”

“So where’d you get the flour?”

“I went down one floor and asked the Polish woman there for some. Her German’s much better.”

We recently ran into the daughter and told her the story. The woman, who had just passed the German bar exam, was flabbergasted. “I don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “He goes shopping. He knows what flour is.” She furrowed her brow. “I’ll have a word with him.” My wife objected. I didn’t. The man had lived in Germany for thirty years. Surely he had seen flour before.

The next day, a knock at the door. I open it to see the burly figure of the father. “Wife in?” he asks. I shake my head, slowly. “Then I tell you. You wife come down. Ask for --.” He put his palms out as if holding a soccer ball.

“Yeah, the flour,” I say.

He nods. “Flour. I no understand. Too fast! Next time, slow. If slow, I understand. Daughter tell me I make big mistake. She tell me, Papa, you make big mistake.”

I laugh. I can’t help it; it’s just a bag of flour, after all. “No, no, no,” I say. “It’s fine.”

“Next time,” he continues, hardly noticing my rudeness, “Ask slow. We have all. Flour, eggs, cheese. We buy big,” he adds, curving his arms out as though hugging a barrel. “Any time. You, you wife, come down. We give you. Any time.”

I thank him, watch him go down the stairs. We say goodbye several times.

They’re our favorite neighbors.

On Sex and Violence

Today, at the gas station, I realized how inured I’ve become to pornography. Instead of deliberately glancing above the racks of big-bosomed, lip-licking trucker porn, I felt my gaze just brush by and over it as I cruised out the door. It was so anticlimactic that I thought it must really mean something.

It’s hard to explain pornography’s role in Europe to anyone who’s only lived within the U.S. Naked breasts appear on a fairly regular basis in Spiegel, the Germany’s equivalent of Time Magazine, and on an extremely rigid schedule on the front page of Bild-Zeitung, a rag which has no equivalent in the U.S. You go beyond accepting porn; you gradually assimilate it into your world view. It’s no longer surprising to see softcore action on public TV after 10:30 p.m. Gratuitous nudity is often used in comedies as a cheap laugh. Off-color jokes now seem only stupid; not stupid and embarrassing. Eventually, you become European in your outlook.

Then, you watch an American film and become overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of it all. I’m certainly not the first to note that most action-film heroes are homicidal psychopaths. And they always triumph by meting out to the villain a horrifically gruesome death. Over the years, I’ve developed a theory that this violence is America’s pornography. Lacking its natural outlet, the animal sex drive appeared, distorted and distended, as America’s love affair with guns, knives, boxing, you name it.

Three Short Months.

I occasionally scout out translation agencies. Partly out of curiosity or boredom, but mostly to reassure myself that I’m not getting a raw deal with my current agency clients. One website gave me a particular chuckle the other day. They talk about clients being “stupid” or “smart”. I stopped cold, though, when they said that 98% of their native-language translators live in their mother countries. They paraded it around like it was a real benefit. And here’s their reasoning:

“How long do you think it takes a person to start to lose their mother-tongue fluency after they have left their mother-country?

• A year?
• Two years?
• Five years?

The answer is three months. Just three months.

Language is fluid. It changes quickly. Both style and vocabulary evolve relentlessly. In the last decade, for example, more than 30,000 new words entered the English language. That's 3,000 new words a year. More than 8 new words every single day. One new word every 3 hours.

No surprise then that a translator living outside of their mother-country finds it difficult to produce contemporary texts - using appropriate style and terminology. So, whenever possible, we work with translators that live and work in their mother-tongue countries - something made possible by our investment in high-speed data and telecommunications technology.”

Did I resent that? Not really. They’re right about the three months, though.

As to their reasoning, here’s some food for thought:

1. Shakespeare is still widely read, despite the fact that, by the above reckoning, 1,164,000 new words have entered the English language since his death. He is also widely misunderstood.

2. Most English native speakers have an active vocabulary of 800 words. Most German native speakers have an active vocabulary of several thousand.

3. In Germany, there are enormous Turkish communities where only Turkish, not German, is spoken.

4. 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides lives in Berlin. Samuel Beckett lived in Paris.

5. The concept of “togethering” was presented and debated at a recent trade show. One of the expert panelists confessed that she didn’t know what “togethering” meant.

6. I don’t know any translators who memorize 8 new words every day. I haven’t memorized vocabulary in almost a decade.

Stigma of Slang

I’ve noticed that whenever I make a linguistic flourish, German clients will pounce on the phrase as “slangy” and ask to have it removed. I’m a professional, so I wince ever so slightly, and do it.

I wince because invariably these changes strip the voice out of the text. Once, I wrote something like “you don’t want to squander your time.” This was struck and replaced with “you don’t want to waste time or money.” Both are idiomatic, but one makes me want to continue reading. The other makes me want to yawn.