GE1011/1021 2014-15
Possible versions and comments on exam translations
1. (Modern society topic) Viele Eltern stellen sich die Frage, ob sie ihre
Kinder alleine mit dem Fahrrad zur Grundschule lassen sollten...
[This text was chosen by all but one student!]
Many parents are asking themselves1 whether they should let their children
ride their bikes to primary school by themselves.2 They are not sure what to
do.3 No, not everything was better in the olden days / things weren’t all better
/ everything didn’t used to be better4 – but a lot of things were different. My
parents for example never gave me a lift anywhere in the car in the mornings,
probably5 something mainly due to there being no need6 to cross7 a single8
road on my way to pre-school or primary school. But the other children too
normally / usually went by themselves. Only a couple of children whose
parent lived (somewhere) a bit further out of the area were dropped off by car,
usually sharing a lift.9 There were10 so few of them that there were10 never
any traffic issues on the road outside11 school caused by12 parents in their
cars.
Somehow it’s all different these days. Apparently13 there are schools
declaring so-called car-free days, so parents and children alike14 can once
again discover15 / experience that it is possible to come to school (lessons) on
foot,16 on a / by bike or by public transport / by walking, cycling or taking
public transport.
1
no German comma!
ordering of phrases is important for the flow
3 ‘verunsichert’ implies a process, they have become unsure, but hard to convey. Wrong versions:
uninsured, unsafe – ‘undecided’ not right in context
4 phrasing implies nostalgia – ‘not better’ does not reflect the emphasis created by the position of
‘nicht’
5 ‘wohl’ commonly omitted
6 to render ‘es galt’ – it was a necessary thing to do
7 wrong versions: overcome, conquer
8 wrong: one-way street
9 incongruous to use the modern, organised, car-pool or sharing scheme?
10 ‘es’ refers to the children, so ‘it was’ would be ungrammatical, as would ‘there was’ for traffic
problems
2
‘vor’ not ‘before school’ which implies time
full relative clause ‘which were caused’ maybe too cumbersome for a complicated sentence;
‘durch’ is used for the passive (by means of what parents do), nothing to do with driving through
anywhere
13 idiomatic use of ‘sollen’ to indicate something reported, said to be the case
14 not ‘like children’
15 ‘erfahren’ can mean experience, but also often used to mean ‘find out’; ‘experience their
childhood’ was inaccurate
16 not ‘by foot’
11
12
The chaotic mini-traffic-jam / chaotic little traffic situation outside numerous
schools and nurseries17 has long since become a part of daily18 life;
sometimes you wonder – yes, even as part of / a contributor to the problem! –
whether there are any children left19 at all20 who come to school under their
own steam,21 as we22 did ourselves, without a thought / as a matter of
course.23
2. (Business Finance topic) Kinder sind teuer...
Children are expensive. By the time24 their offspring are of age, parents will
have paid25 on average 120 thousand euros for clothing, food, rent or toys. 26
And this amount includes neither27 loss of income28 if the father or mother
takes a career break, nor paying out for driving lessons / paying for them to
learn to drive,29 let alone / not to mention30 the expense if their son or
daughter wants to go to university too.
What should young and would-be parents / young parents and parents-to-be
look out for / think about? Tax advisers say that31 marriage always pays off /
it’s always worth getting married. This isn’t romantic, but applies32 all the
more to couples wanting to start a family. Women can claim (a) maternity
allowance six weeks before the due date – their health insurance will pay33 up
to 13 euros per day.
is the term ‘day-care centres’ confined to older people?
‘Alltag’ does not mean all day – a daily occurrence / commonplace
19 several omitted ‘noch’ - still
20 ‘überhaupt’ frequently omitted, which loses the rhetorical flourish
21 ‘unmotorisiert’ is a witty formulation, so deserved something more idiomatic and colourful
22 translating ‘man’ flexibly (as above with ‘you’) with ‘we’ contributes to the idiomatic and
conversational tone of this article, inviting the reader to agree
23 ‘selbstverständlich’ does not mean independently - though this sense fits the context, it is
inaccurate as a translation.
24 ‘bis’ – not really ‘until’ here
25 ‘will pay’ – not a future tense but an expression of likelihood in English – ‘will have paid’ is not
strictly the correct tense, but is consistent with ‘by the time’
26 ‘bills’ is too general a term for ‘Miete’ etc
27 some did not know ‘weder…noch’, neither…nor
28 sometimes wrongly read as ‘Fälle’, cases
29 driving licence is too literal
30 ‘schweigen’ to be silent, say nothing (not known by several)
31 German uses a colon to introduce an idea, English would not here
32 ‘gelten’ without als / für does not mean ‘considered to be’ but is valid, is the case; ‘umso mehr’
– all the more / moreso
33 translated here as an active form – the German passive with (ihnen) dative object verb means
they are paid, they do not pay it!
17
18
The child has arrived, everything has changed.34 The application form for
child benefit, downloadable35 from the work and pensions agency’s /
employment department’s36 website, is easy to complete, and soon
afterwards 184 euros a month are paid into37 your account by the children
and families department.38
And if39 Granny now wants to put something aside40 for her grandson,41 that’s
wonderful, since the parents’ budget is by now usually under pressure. 42
Even43 with small sums of money, nothing pays off so well as beginning to
save early.
If mother and father (are) both (at) work they can offset up to two thirds of
childcare fees against tax.44 If only one parent is working, this is only possible
when the child reaches (the age of) three.
3. (Fiction) Als ich endlich Bournemouth erreichte...
When45 I finally reached Bournemouth, with its many medium-sized hotels
overlooking a dark sea46 from on high / perched47 high above a black lake, I
was soaked to the skin / dripping wet. I chose a hostelry / selected an
establishment48 in a side street solely / for no other reason than / purely
Worth matching the rhythm of this short phrase which conveys the sudden change – ‘alles
anders’ does not mean ‘everything else’ – it is short for ‘alles ist anders’ within the repeated /
implied syntactic pattern
35 the ‘zu’ in ‘herunterzuladen’ is a structure which indicates that it is possible to / may be
downloaded (concisely, –able)
36 this part of the text had several terms culturally specific to German bureaucracy, rendered with
their approximate equivalents in England, in lower case so as not to imply the title of that specific
agency
37 ‘überweisen’ is the verb for making a bank transfer, does not really mean ‘receive’, but amounts
to the same thing, so accepted
38 ‘Familienkasse’ mistaken as ‘family account’, but it is the source of the money
39 ‘falls’ – if, should she want to (unknown by many)
40 not ‘leave behind’
41 ‘Enkel’ mistakenly uncle, godchild, nephew, ankle…
42 not ‘exhausted’
43 unlikely to mean ‘also’ in this context
44 ‘steuerlich geltend’ means it counts / is allowable in terms of tax
45 not ‘as’
46 most rendered ‘der [einem] See’ correctly as lake, although the published source text has
‘einer’, [die See] – indeed sea is most logical for the coastal town of Bournemouth. In view of the
typo, both were accepted. The text was originally written and published in English by US author
Bill Bryson
47 this worked well to render ‘thronen’ – the published English text uses this
48 the exaggerated choice of phrasing was important throughout this text to create the humorous /
ironic tone (capturing the tone with appropriate vocabulary choices belongs with the higher-level
marking criteria) – ‘flat’ choices made this an ordinary factual account, instead of a witty anecdote
34
because49 I liked its sign so much, its lovely big pink neon lettering shining
invitingly through the pouring / torrential / pelting rain. I went in, water
dripping off me / shedding water, and saw at a glance that I had chosen well /
I had made a good choice. I tipped / decanted50 several pints of water out of /
from my sleeves and asked for51 a single room for two nights.
“Is it raining outside? / Raining out, is it?” asked the girl at reception cheerfully
/ brightly,52 as I filled out my registration card.
“No, my ship sank53 and I had to swim the last seven miles.”
“Oh yes? / Yeah?” she went on, in such a way that I suspected54 she wasn’t
really paying55 attention to what I was saying./ attending closely to my words.
I got my key and went off dripping to look56 for my room. There I began the
ritual of the lone / lonesome traveler: unpacked my rucksack carefully, draped
my57 wet clothes over the radiator, laid out the clean ones on the bed, as if I
was58 going to my first high-school prom and positioned travel alarm and
holiday reading59 with greatest60 precision on the bedside table.61
some problems with ‘einzig und allein’, the emphatic equivalent of ‘only’ – wrongly rendered as
standing alone, singled out, unique.
50 Bryson
51 not ‘booked’
52 several omitted ‘munter’; Bryson’s ‘brightly’ indicates the lack of sincere concern
53 rather too many wrote ‘sunk’ (actually the past participle of the irregular English verb)
54 ‘der Verdacht’ is suspicion, not ‘impression’
55 tense errors common here – ‘had paid little attention’
56 ‘sich auf die Suche begeben’ – to set off in search of, cf. sich auf den Weg begeben (to set off)
57 possessive more idiomatic in English than definite article
58 not ‘like when I went’ – misses the use of Konjunktiv II for the ‘as if’ structure (‘als ob’ normally,
or this alternative with ‘ob’ omitted, so word order adapted)
59 the hyphen indicates ‘Reiselektüre’, not holiday guides or brochures but what he had brought
with him to read on the journey
60 note superlative form -st
61 ‘nightstand’ accepted, an americanism
49