1-01 (March 2001) by Ulrich Thiele Special Aspects Germany U.S.A. European Union

In this forum most of the articles have dealt with rather technically oriented problems concerning translations of technical contents in writing only. Differences in culture between the different people add more problems, as we learned during several months of work with four mixed German/American project teams.

 

How it All Started

During the past couple of months I - as a German - have worked on a project in which North-American colleagues were involved. At the same time, three of my German partners were involved independently also in German/American projects. When we - by chance - exchanged our experiences on those individual projects, we found we had experienced quite a lot of very basic problems, that could not be connected only to the language barrier. We agreed that the problems mostly emerged from different cultures with different educational and political backgrounds, rather than from pure communication. In this article I will summarize what we have found to be important to know about our North-American partners, beyond the translation-related points of view.

I have to point out that these experiences are not based on any systematic research, and are not at all of any statistical relevance! They are just impressions, picked from a couple of months of cooperation between Germans and Americans. I should also mention that one of my partners is a native American, living and working now for more than a decade in Germany.

When preparing this article we tried to exclude any statements that are based on emotions or on the personal characters of the colleagues we had been working with. Needless to say, we are looking only from this side of the Atlantic, not from the other direction, from the American point of view. (It would be very interesting for us to hear the problems that an American engineer has experienced with Germans when working on a mutual project like this.)

 

The Language Barrier

A major part of our problems may be deduced from the different languages and the different ways of interpreting what is said or written. Only a small amount of the German and American languages seem to match, whereas large portions of the languages are not compatible with each other.

How to Communicate

After the last meeting we were told that working in the Netherlands, for instance, is much more efficient for Americans because of the much more American-minded attitude of the Netherlands engineers. My unspoken comment on this was: as we had agreed on cooperating for a two-year German project, surely one of our American colleagues could have tried to learn a little German in preparation for that.

Reading Between the Lines

I remember a telephone conversation between the American and German teams during which, on the German side, some members of the American team also were present. Parts of the scope of work had been discussed in English, and finally the American partners in New York agreed to take over additional work.

Later we discussed the conversation with our American colleagues who had attended the telephone conference with us, and were very surprised to hear that they were convinced that nobody on the American side had ever agreed to take over the additional work! The reason for this misunderstanding, apparently, was that Germans tend to stay exactly with the spoken word, whereas with the American language one has to learn to read " between the lines". Thus an American "Yes" might mean "absolutely no way", depending on the context and the situation.

Translation Problems

In our different projects, my friends and I are used to working with translated documents, done by translation experts. This, however, was different, because we had immediate feedback during the project meetings, when the German partners with the translated documents and the Americans with their originals discussed the documents with each other.

We found the translation quality of different translation companies in some cases to be inadequate (not necessarily wrong, but differing in important details because of different meanings in the two languages). For example: the term "initial installation", which on first sight seems to be simple to translate, but when we completely understood the whole software concept behind this English term, we found there is no comparable German expression. Instead we had to explain the initial installation in several sentences to make it unmistakable to the German team members.

Interestingly, usually it is the other way around: you find abundant redundancy in English technical writing because of the lack of technical terms and the multiple meanings of English words (such as "appropriate"). In English this means inserting several explanatory sentences, just to describe a single issue. In these cases sentence-by-sentence translations expand the text unnecessarily and make it hard for Germans to read. It created additional work for us, to reduce the translations down to the essentials.

 

Ways of Communication

We noticed differences in how each party communicated using technical means. Americans seem to be far ahead of the German "handy communication" generation. They have already learned it is impolite to interrupt their colleagues during working hours or disturb their meetings by phone or cellphone. So we found our American colleagues always in search of plugs to hook up their laptops instead. Most communications were made via e-mail. If it was absolutely necessary to call, this was announced by e-mail well in advance. That explains why, during our project, we seldom saw an American colleague using a cellphone.

 

The American Way of Working

During our different American projects we learned quite a bit about how our American colleagues work. Their organizing methods and procedures are based on different structures and hierarchies than Germans are accustomed to.

• Before discussing any project related contents, it was very important for our American colleagues to know who was taking part in the project and what was his exact position and responsibility. It could happen in case of disagreements on technical issues, that instead of arguing on a technical basis we had to answer questions like "What's your role in this project anyway?"
• A person’s educational background sometimes seems to be much more important than a person’s professional competence. It happened more than once that at a first meeting, one of the first questions on the American side was: "What is your background?" This is something which for Germans seems rather intruding when meeting a person for the first time.
• As a proof for activities our American colleagues sent us numerous updates on documents, each one incomplete and of preliminary status. If the documents had to be translated, this especially proved to be an inefficient back and forth procedure. Even after deadlines had expired, more updates kept coming in and endangered the project schedule. Those updates were sent to everybody's attention, also via mailing lists to people who were only remotely involved, which for us proved to be a time consuming way of working. (We seemed to accumulate piles of papers in different projects!)
• Open issues that probably cannot be resolved right away, were simply ignored. Only if project management insisted repeatedly on an answer, was a solution presented, and then only reluctantly.

 

Conclusion

At first sight there seem to be a lot of differences in culture and educational background between the two nations, which disturb efficient and smooth cooperation within a team. However knowing these differences (at best both sides should read a "How-to" guide before) it is quite easy to come to terms. We think that people should agree upon certain rules of "behaviour" before starting a mutual project.

As already mentioned it would be very helpful to get a feedback on how Americans experience the German working culture. The same goes for European colleagues. They may have quite different points of view regarding their German counterparts.

Finally we have to say, that for everybody it was an adventure none of us would have liked to miss, and we are prepared and looking forward to the next mixed-culture projects.  

"transline Deutschland - Übersetzungsdienst für technische Übersetzung"