Have you ever had a German/Austrian/Swiss apparently get angry at you because he did not understand something you said, and then act like he was surprised when you (naturally) got on the defensive?
Well, it might all be a (widespread) translation mistake.
In German, “confusing” can be translated as “irritierend.” So many, many, MANY Germans make the mistake of saying “irritating” in English when they mean “confusing” (even Google translate does this!). So they say “I find your statement irritating” and do not understand when you answer “I am sorry to make you angry.” The problem is that, in English, “irritating” means annoying or infuriating (a second meaning is to cause irritation to a body part). So, dear German speakers, please do not say that something is irritating you unless you really, really mean you find it ärgerlich.
These mistakes can be confusing, and sometimes even mildly irritating. I am sure I make lots of them mixing words and constructions from my native Spanish into my English or my German (although that’s probably nothing compared to when I try speaking Italian), so I am not claiming to hold any kind of higher ground here. Still, after a couple of decades of witnessing German speakers make the same mistakes in English again and again, I have a sort of personal favourites list, and thought to share the top three here.
Irritating confusions (or is it confusing irritations?) only make the third place. The second place is, strictly speaking, not a mistake, but an irritating custom which creates considerable confusion, namely the German tendency to “translate” English words by using different English words (the German film industry also does that with the titles of movies, but that is another story). A cell phone is called a “handy” (no matter how bulky it might be), a projector is called a “beamer” (even if Scotty is not handling it), and a “body bag” (I kid you not) is a messenger bag (the one you can carry your laptop in and use in a cross-body fashion). I still expect to see a corpse somewhere when somebody mentions a “body bag,” but that might just be me. I could go on: bullying becomes mobbing, a comic book gets shortened to a comic, public screening becomes public viewing, and suddenly a spa becomes a wellness area. What makes this custom irritating for me is that it is quite impossible not to pick it up when you live in a German-speaking country for years, creating all sorts of confusion when you speak English out of the country and ask where the beamer is after putting your handy away… Oh boy.
Anyway, the undisputed first place is taken by what I have been calling “German Adverbial Blindness” for a while (in the hope the expression will catch and contribute to end the phenomenon). The problem is that Germans do not really have adverbs (or they do not distinguish them from adjectives). So they completely overlook the need to add “-ly” at the end of adjectives to convert them into adverbs. You end up with gems as “agents act rational,” “travellers fly direct,” “she completed the task perfect,” or “he dressed elegant,” all of which make an English speaker cringe. Dear German speakers, some people do act rationally, travellers like to fly directly to their destinations, a good performance means carrying out your assigned tasks perfectly, and it is always good to dress elegantly. Sorry, I really had to get that off my chest.
This one is particularly irritating (but not even a bit confusing) when it happens in an academic context. My favourite example is the concept of “evolutionarily stable strategy,” which is used in Game Theory to capture the notion of, well, evolutionary stability (gratuitous, shameless self-advertising here). I repeat. The underlying concept is evolutionary (adjective) stability, so a strategy fulfilling that is an evolutionarily (adverb) stable strategy. And yet, as an associate editor and editor of various journals, I have seen over a dozen submitted papers where German-speaking researchers speak of “evolutionary stable strategies” (quiver!). I freely admit that I consider that and similar expressions (like agents who act or do not act “rational” in an experimental paper) to tilt the balance when considering whether to desk-reject a paper. This might sound extreme, but think about it. The whole literature is using a standard expression which, naturally, correctly uses the -ly form. Then an author comes and says “evolutionary stable strategy” (even writing it makes me feel bad). Unavoidably, that sends three messages: (i) the author cannot write in English; (ii) the author does not know the literature; and (iii) the author did not bother having the paper checked. If you put (i), (ii), and (iii) together, it follows that (iv) the paper is not worth the editor’s and reviewers’ time (sorry!). OK, I am of course exaggerating to make the point, but really, there is no other way to put it: G.A.B. is irritating.
Carlos' Ramblings 