My Translations

In general, I translate phrase-by-phrase and not word-for-word. 

This means I take a text and break it down into phrases of about 3 - 7 words each. A phrase could have more words or less words, but most will fall in that range. The number of words isn't the most important criteria for determining where one phrase ends and another begins, though; what's important is that each phrase feels whole and can stand alone. Sometimes it's a complete sentence or thought, sometimes it's not. 

Here's an example. I'll translate the following German phrase, first word-for-word and then phrase-by-phrase:

DE: "Er ist mir auf den Keks gegangen."
EN: (word-for-word translation) "He is me on the cookie gone."
EN: (phrase-by-phrase translation) "He was bugging me!"

As you can see, the word-for-word translation sounds a little weird, for two reasons. First, the words are in a strange order. This is because German word order is often different than English word order. 

Second, there is an idiom in the German sentence that does not have an equivalent in English. In German, if you say that someone "is going you on the cookie," it means that someone is annoying you. The phrase has nothing to do with an actual cookie, the same way that the English phrase "biting the dust" has nothing to do with getting dust in your mouth. If you were to translate "biting the dust" word-for-word into German, it would sound just as silly as "going on the cookie" sounds in English.

I like translating phrase-by-phrase for two main reasons. First, it makes the English translation more engaging and fun. Second, I believe it looking at a language phrase-by-phrase is helpful for language learning.

This doesn't mean word-for-word translations are useless for language learning. A word-for-word translation can help you understand the structure of a language on a grammatical level. It also helps you identify each word precisely. I just won't be doing much of that on this blog because armed with a good dictionary, you could probably do that yourself. If I do present a word-for-word translation, I'll mark it with this symbol: =literally= 

Capitalization and Punctuation

I don't use a lot of capitalization or punctuation in my song lyrics or translations. There are two main reasons. First, in German, all nouns are capitalized, regardless of where they come in the sentence. Knowing which words are nouns helps comprehension, especially when you're a beginner. If I were to capitalize the first word in each sentence (or each line), it would make it harder to see which words were nouns.

Second, songs lyrics are often written in such a way that it's hard to break them up into sentences anyway. Songs often reflect the way we talk, which is much less polished than the way we write.