We had German on the brain this past week, despite being in Barcelona for the Language Standards for Global Business summit and then Localization World. Three Teutonic-related issues caught our attention:

• Technical translators are artists. Surprised? So were some German language service providers when the German government demanded that they pay a special tax on freelance translators of technical manuals. The tax authorities categorize these translators as artists for whom employers must pay over 5% of their freelance rates into a special government retirement fund for artists. Of course, when the translator of “Handbuch für technische Autoren und Redakteure: Produktinformation und Dokumentation im Multimedia-Zeitalter” applies for his pension in 20 years, you can bet that the retirement police will take a different stand when he claims his status as an artist.
• A German word decided the U.S. spelling championship. The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee ended when the winner, a 13-year old girl from Spring Lake, New Jersey (exit 98 on the Garden State Parkway), correctly spelled “ursprache,” an English word surely familiar to most American teenagers. Among the other German words that showed up in the finals of the annual championship were “lebensraum,” “blitzkrieg,” Wehrmacht,” “Gotterdammerung,” and “weltschmerz.” This list of words left us wondering about the mental state and reading habits of the person choosing the words for the final until we got to “langlaufer.” That one sent us to the dictionary — it’s a cross-country or Nordic skier.
• Nike’s site for footballers offers a pretty nifty, albeit slow to load, site. We poked around its German variant, a cool-looking destination. That is, cool-looking until you read the German. The big “Spiele Schön” (see the image above) struck as odd, so we asked our local deutschsprecher Hans Fenstermacher what he thought. He confirmed our suspicions that “nobody would say ‘Spiele Schön,’ although it’s not grammatically incorrect.” He went on to tell us that “the translations are extremely literal. Very unlocalized stuff. It looks amateurish, especially when compared to the high production values the site has.” Meanwhile, our resident Brazilian expert told us that “spiele schön” is a literal translation from the Portuguese “joga bonito” (“play beautiful”). He said that it just as important to play beautifully as it is to win, but “that does not apply when we play against Argentina.” Elsewhere the English Nike site asked us to “stand for beautiful football.” The Czech and Russian sites echoed that lofty English sentiment. We were left asking who writes Nike’s copy and who does the translation?