Articles and Stories

May 10, 2013

Recently we assisted a German movie production with German language pronunciation. The entire short movie was to be spoken in German as well as English with a German accent, but all the actors were Americans with no background in German and no previous German language experience.

That was a challenge!

The challenge was to come up with German translations of words that are pronounceable for English tongues. Germans use very different sounds than English speakers, sounds that do not exist in English. There are websites that talk about curling your tongue, constricting your airflow and ‘your lips should be very round and closed’. But hardly any English pronunciation ever comes close to sounding German. The same can be said about Germans trying to pronounce English sounds. English sounds like the ‘th’, the ‘r’, the ‘x’, the ‘v’ and ‘w’ cause big problems for Germans.

In the movie, one actor had to direct others to the right and to the left by giving commands in German. Left is easy to say in English, it sounds just like in English ‘links’, links you find on a website. Right, or ‘rechts’, however, was impossible to pronounce without revealing that the actor was not German, so the translation was changed to “that way”, or in German ‘da lang’ and the actor moved his hand to emphasize ‘go right’.

When the actors had to speak German sounding German, the training required English words that can be pronounced sounding German. One such word was ‘weiter’, or ‘go on’. The word ‘weiter’ can be spoken with that recognizable German ‘w’ to make you sound like a native German speaker.

In daily life, due to these differences in sounds and pronunciations, misunderstandings between German and English speakers can occur as this joke shows:

A German tourist jumped into the freezing water and braved being swept away by the strong currents to save a drowning puppy.

On getting back onto the bridge, he carefully examined the puppy all over.

Then he told the terrified lady owner, “Ze dog she is ok. She vill be fine.”

Due to his selfless heroic act, the stunned lady could only ask, “Are you a vet?”

He replied, “Vet? Can’t you see, I’m soaked!”