Kleingartenverein
Oct. 14th, 2004 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dream_labyrinthThere are some words in the German language that are so much a name for a typical German trait that I somehow wonder whether there is an English word for them at all.
Which is a problem right now, because I'm working on another translation and came across one of these words.
For those who have ever been in a middle-sized German town, you probably have seen little plots of land with many fences, and in between the fences towel-sized gardens, often close to railway tracks.
Kleingartenanlagen.
AFAIK, these go back to the Twenties, when it was necessary firstly to get people to grow their own food and secondly to get them some fresh air. (It could even be earlier then that, now that I think about it.)
So these little empty spots of land were transformed into gardens, and people could grow vegetables and have a place to spend their weekends.
In Britain, I suppose there were this huge housing areas with small backyards to each house, so maybe they didn't need this solution. But here, large apartment buildings were build, and people couldn't have a backyard at their house.
So anyway, the Kleingarten.
Many people have them, at least in my part of Germany. And they spend all their weekends cutting the hedges and pulling weeds and painting fences and whatnot. They're about as crazy about their gardens as about their cars, and that is something.
I have seen a lot of them with plastic or stone figures (dwarfs, deer, geese, birds...), a flagpole with German flags (or Confederate flags for the "rebels"), little house and bench and all kinds of vegetables and flowers.
But all this knowledge doesn't help me find a good English word for it. And I don't even need the word for one of these things (I could call it just a garden or, as the dictionary suggested, allotment), but for a whole thing, for several gardens at once. Usually, the ones in one spot form some sort of association, which would be a Kleingartenverein. And I just can't think of a good word for that.
Makes me feel alternately incredibly stupid and incredibly angry at the makers of the text. And if I ever meet them, their chances of survival are bad anyway, because I need to do a lot of reworking of the German text before translating. Not that I'm writing that down, I don't care if they don't speak their own language properly. For some reason they seem to think that nouns are good, verbs are bad.
It's very much like a Dilbert comic. Substitute all "do"s with "implementation". That sort of thing. And not only do sentences get very complicated, there also is a high risk of simply being wrong. Which means I need to trace back what they most likely want to say and then translate that.
Anyway, they're going to pay me for it, which is at least something.
And it keeps me from thinking too much about the job situation. (Here I go again, so we see how good that distraction idea works. )
The basic thing is this, no matter how I decide (provided I do get the okay from the army), there is always the danger of me not liking the place I decided on, and then thinking that I probably made the wrong decision.
Knowing myself, I might get really depressed when something doesn't work out the way I want it to and get upset about me not chosing the other place.
But I can't be in two places at the same time, and from what I saw of the university yesterday, I'm not too eager to actually work there. I haven't seen the other place yet, so the university might still end up being the lesser evil. But there is no way of knowing how it is to work somewhere before I actually do just that.
Whatever. I have a fanfic idea in mind I need to write down, so I'll do that and stop worrying about something I can't solve before Monday anyway.
Language sidenote: Is "forestrial" the adjective to "forestry"? The dictionary doesn't have it, but google has several sites that seem to use the word in this sense.
Which is a problem right now, because I'm working on another translation and came across one of these words.
For those who have ever been in a middle-sized German town, you probably have seen little plots of land with many fences, and in between the fences towel-sized gardens, often close to railway tracks.
Kleingartenanlagen.
AFAIK, these go back to the Twenties, when it was necessary firstly to get people to grow their own food and secondly to get them some fresh air. (It could even be earlier then that, now that I think about it.)
So these little empty spots of land were transformed into gardens, and people could grow vegetables and have a place to spend their weekends.
In Britain, I suppose there were this huge housing areas with small backyards to each house, so maybe they didn't need this solution. But here, large apartment buildings were build, and people couldn't have a backyard at their house.
So anyway, the Kleingarten.
Many people have them, at least in my part of Germany. And they spend all their weekends cutting the hedges and pulling weeds and painting fences and whatnot. They're about as crazy about their gardens as about their cars, and that is something.
I have seen a lot of them with plastic or stone figures (dwarfs, deer, geese, birds...), a flagpole with German flags (or Confederate flags for the "rebels"), little house and bench and all kinds of vegetables and flowers.
But all this knowledge doesn't help me find a good English word for it. And I don't even need the word for one of these things (I could call it just a garden or, as the dictionary suggested, allotment), but for a whole thing, for several gardens at once. Usually, the ones in one spot form some sort of association, which would be a Kleingartenverein. And I just can't think of a good word for that.
Makes me feel alternately incredibly stupid and incredibly angry at the makers of the text. And if I ever meet them, their chances of survival are bad anyway, because I need to do a lot of reworking of the German text before translating. Not that I'm writing that down, I don't care if they don't speak their own language properly. For some reason they seem to think that nouns are good, verbs are bad.
It's very much like a Dilbert comic. Substitute all "do"s with "implementation". That sort of thing. And not only do sentences get very complicated, there also is a high risk of simply being wrong. Which means I need to trace back what they most likely want to say and then translate that.
Anyway, they're going to pay me for it, which is at least something.
And it keeps me from thinking too much about the job situation. (Here I go again, so we see how good that distraction idea works. )
The basic thing is this, no matter how I decide (provided I do get the okay from the army), there is always the danger of me not liking the place I decided on, and then thinking that I probably made the wrong decision.
Knowing myself, I might get really depressed when something doesn't work out the way I want it to and get upset about me not chosing the other place.
But I can't be in two places at the same time, and from what I saw of the university yesterday, I'm not too eager to actually work there. I haven't seen the other place yet, so the university might still end up being the lesser evil. But there is no way of knowing how it is to work somewhere before I actually do just that.
Whatever. I have a fanfic idea in mind I need to write down, so I'll do that and stop worrying about something I can't solve before Monday anyway.
Language sidenote: Is "forestrial" the adjective to "forestry"? The dictionary doesn't have it, but google has several sites that seem to use the word in this sense.
