Saturday 29 June 2013

neudeutsche or bahnglisch

Sometimes I get very frustrated, after trying to formulate how to translate something in my head, only to have it paraphrased by a native speaker as, “Ja—das Meeting wรผrde gecanceled.” Aber hatte ich schon das Satz gegoogled...
There was initiative taking place in the hallowed halls of the national German railway network, die Deutsche Bahn, to standardize signage and spoken terminology, insisting on consistency for in-house jargon on the pain of being written-up and for dealing with the public, to cater to international travelers with a mix of English and German, which seems to play out as a disservice to speakers of either or both languages. First, there was the newly labelled ,,Counters” as opposed to Schalter or Theke and ,,Service Points” are something different—Auskunft spots, I suppose but guests in the train station were put in a position to guess. There are hybrids like ,,Ausgang – City,” exit to the Stadt or complete inventions like Rail&Fly. Fortunately, the ministry of transportation is reclaiming much of this pidgin language and has ordered the reversion to proper German and less pseudo-English phrases. Not juried by linguists, I suspect, this constructed language was rife with inconsistencies and a source of confusion but it was interesting nonetheless to see how different conceptions, under the lesson of your grammar called “At the train-station,” were presented and understood.