The Linguist

The Linguist 56,5 – October/November 2017

The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology

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FEATURES Germany's 20th-century history. As part of a larger project on Germany's 'Memory Mainstream', we have begun to identify areas where there is potential to enrich the visitor's experience by translating more than the source text. As identified by translator Allison Brown, the challenges of translating historical terminology for museums include the need to understand the currency that words have among historians and the need to envisage the gaps in English speakers' historical knowledge. 1 We find that cultural knowledge is not only a question of proper nouns and propaganda terms; authors writing in German use the temporal adverbs noch, schon and erst ('still', 'already', 'not until') to express their sense of how late or early a historical event occurred in relation to its background. If a writer states that something happens 'already in 1929' or 'as late as May 1933', he or she assumes the German reader's knowledge of the politics of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's accession to power in January 1933. This can indicate, for instance, that the person being written about was an out-and-out Nazi. An admittedly unscientific survey of students suggests that these chronologies are less firmly fixed in British minds. TRANSLATING OBJECTS Beyond terminology, we also see objects, museum names, museum architecture and Germany's memory culture as translatable (but currently untranslated) aspects of the museum. In what sense do objects need 'translating'? Museums already routinely verbalise the function and meaning of historic objects, where these are no longer self-evident to a modern audience; while Jewish museums regularly 'translate' objects for a non-Jewish audience. As the example of the Schultüte shows, gaps open up where museums see no need to translate an object because it is still known to the home audience. The German-Russian Museum in Berlin shows a tin of 'frost salve' to illustrate how hopelessly ill-equipped German soldiers were for the Russian winter. Museum scholars understand that when we view objects behind glass we engage our other senses (touch, smell, hearing) based on our prior knowledge of the object. In this case, a German viewer can 'feel' the insubstantial weight of the little tin of cream because this kind of tin is still sold in German supermarkets. With nothing similar in British shops (a plastic pot of Nivea is bigger and heavier), that effect cannot be communicated to a non-German viewer – at least not without translation. Germany's museum boom has created a colourful array of museum names which are self-explanatory to educated Germans, and baffling to outsiders. A museum may be called a Denkort ('place of reflection'), Erinnerungsort ('place of remembrance'), Mahnmal ('memorial'), or Dokumentationszentrum ('documentation centre'). This last term evokes nothing very definite when calqued into English (perhaps a data collection service?), but represents, in Germany, a strong commitment to a CULTURAL GAPS Peter Jacob on his first day at school in Berlin on 3 May 1933, exhibited in the Jewish Museum Berlin. German viewers will instantly recognise the significance of the Schultüte (cone of sweets), but most non- German viewers will require an explanation JEWISH MUSEUMBERLIN, DONATED BY PETER SINCLAIR, FORMERLY PETER JACOB

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