Work Experience: Public Authorities

In terms of the work I actually did, I started with reviewing their tourist information portal, going through webpage after webpage to find “German-isms” within the English text which might cause confusion with visitors using English to get around. Once I had proved that I could actually handle German, I got moved from review to translation, most notably a presentation that was being sent out to residents explaining changes to the local rules concerning bio-waste disposal and collection.

This of course meant that I had to familiarise myself with the rules at the federal level, then the state level, before then looking at prior English translations to collect the right—or at least familiar—terminology.

Finally, my time at the town hall ended with translating a presentation and speech to be given by the mayor to celebrate the anniversary of the twinning between the town of Oberursel and the borough of Rushmoor (which is where I went to school).

The biggest issue—apart from the pure panic of having that suddenly put on my desk—was that Rushmoor and Oberursel were both referred to as a “Stadt” in German, but in English, the two built-up areas could not be combined under the same term (although Oberursel was once a kind of borough, so I possibly could have gotten away with that) and so I had to try and find a variety of solutions to umbrella the two areas together without rewriting the entire speech.

This was so that the speech could be followed along on paper and in English while not diverting too drastically from the information structure of the German (otherwise you might get a clash of body language or intonation, etc). The presentation, source and translation being both of the same medium, had less restrictions and so was easier to wrangle into shape. This is why we say that translation happens at a variety of levels—translation decisions at the document-level often dictate how problems are solved at the word-level.