https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu3QIGLQD_o The computer game in this “letsplay” video is Hidden and Dangerous 2, for the PC (and possibly more). It’s a first-person shooter, as they are called, where you play as SAS soldiers carrying out missions in World War 2 against the Nazis. I’ve played it myself and I remember this bit well enough. Normally you are allowed to have up to four soldiers at any one time as you are playing a level, but this is one of the levels where you only get to have one soldier; the mission being to steal important documents from a Nazi-occupied castle with the help of a friendly undercover female agent whose name is Elizabeth Salter. There’s your explanation of this video’s content.
I imagine you are already wondering why I would mention this in an article which is supposed to have the aim of promoting me as a professional translator. And what exactly is the “translation a bit too real” bit supposed to be? Well, this is the point where I draw your attention to this bit in the video: 3:05-3:11. The bit where two German soldiers have arrived to unload the lorry that the character you play as here drove up to the location in (even if there’s no clue of that in the briefing bit at the start of this video). Now, in this video, you can see that, a short while back, after the player gives the papers to the officer, the officer tells the player’s character to go to the warehouse and “wait for the soldiers to unload it, “it” being said lorry. This is a requirement for completing this level, but immediately after that the officer picks up a phone and asks someone on the other end to send down two soldiers to the courtyard to unload the lorry; it’s just that, in this case, the player leaves that room too quickly for you to see or hear any of that. But back to the aforementioned bit in the video; when one of the German soldiers says, “Was sollen wir tun?”, that means “What should we do?” The response that the player’s character gives is, of course, “Put the crates back there along the wall”, in German. (The German soldier’s response to that, “Gut”, merely means “good”, or more like “fine” in this context.) But the exact German words the player’s character says for “Put the crates back there along the wall” are “Die Kisten kommen wieder an die Wände” – for the average person who speaks both English and German, it’s all too easy to translate such a German sentence as something like, “The crates go alongside the walls again” (even though “kommen” normally means “come”). Feel free to look up each of these individual words at your leisure.
Now here comes the “a bit too real” part. Can you imagine actually being the SAS soldier in a scenario like this, being expected to pass yourself off as a German throughout, and dealing with (possibly unexpected) conversation in a language other than your mother tongue not only in “good” German but with actual native ability, including “using German like the Germans do” (and not forgetting the accent)? Because failure to do this could easily prove a giveaway to the Germans that you are an enemy engaging in subterfuge and then you would most likely be killed in seconds! How stressful would you find that? At the aforementioned point in the video, when the German soldier says, “What should we do?”, that bit is definitely unexpected conversation and he expects you to realise that he is talking to you, and trying to avoid him would be pretty much guaranteed to arouse suspicion, which is definitely NOT what you want when carrying out a mission like this! Don’t you agree that there was a tense moment there just after the German soldier says, “What should we do?” to you: the short moment of silence before the SAS soldier manages to say something – anything – that will hopefully pass for a normal and satisfactory response in his eyes? Right at that point the SAS soldier was unexpectedly put in a situation in which he had literally seconds to not only understand what the German soldier had said but then think of a sensible response, before announcing it in perfect and unbroken German, and all with a perfect German accent, if the enemy was to believe that he was indeed German when he wasn’t.
Myself, I can say “Put the crates back there along the wall” in German easily enough, but I wouldn’t have said it as, “Die Kisten kommen wieder an die Wände”. My way of saying it would have been much more like, “Setzen Sie die Kisten entlang der Wände da hinten.” Perfectly valid, and a good enough effort for a non-native speaker, but it’s just not German as Germans speak it, if this video is anything to go by. Here’s the list of points:
I couldn’t help noticing that the English translation of “Die Kisten kommen wieder an die Wände” supplied in this game, as can be seen in the video, is structured as a command when those words in German don’t constitute one, as I explained above, near the end of paragraph two.
“Wieder” in German means “again”, yet that word is omitted in the English translation. If we were talking about translating “Put the crates back there along the wall” into German, why would anyone consider it best to include word for “again” in it? Because that’s what we get in this video, isn’t it?
There’s nothing covering the “back there” bit in “Die Kisten kommen wieder an die Wände”.
The German word for “along” is “entlang”, not “an”; I always knew “an” to mean “on”, so is there something I’ve missed? Unless we’re talking about hanging things on hooks that are sticking out of walls, how else exactly do you put something “on” a wall of a room with a ceiling? And a crate of munitions is far bigger and heavier than a picture that you can hang on a wall. Yet the words the SAS soldier says here are, “Die Kisten kommen wieder an die Wände”, which I think it is safe to assume is more how Germans would actually say it (i.e. German as spoken by Germans) compared to “Setzen Sie die Kisten entlang der Wände da hinten”, even if that is perfectly correct merely from the standpoint of the German language (for its vocabulary and linguistic rules and such) in itself.
…Like I said, the moment of interaction between the SAS soldier and the German soldier I have been discussing here involves requires the former to maintain the façade that he is a German soldier or (most likely) be killed – he manages this successfully, but it calls for a command of German which, I believe, just goes over the heads of most people who are anything less than fluent in the language; and, in light of all the points I have made in connection with it, that’s why I call it all “a translation moment a bit too real”.