The Outside Minister

There's a particularly fun brand of "Denglish" (that's "Deutsch" (German) + "English," if you didn't know) that involves translating German words and phrases as literally as you possibly can, to make convoluted, bizarre English that's just barely recognizable if you can sort out what it was originally meant to be in German.

Just imagine a German who doesn't actually know English trying to translate something by working out one word at a time with a dictionary – or simply plug some text into Google Translate.

I'm not sure whether this hyperliteral Denglish is still funny if you don't know German at all, but it generates such gems as

"falling umbrella jumper" for parachute jumper (Fallschirmspringer, where "Schirm" could also be understood as umbrella) or

"far-looking tower" for TV tower ("Fernsehturm," where "Fernsehen" literally means "seeing far"...just as "television" does, if you think about it!) or

"I think I spider" ("Ich glaube, ich spinne" means "I must be nuts" – but "Spinne" could also be understood the noun for spider, rather than the verh for "to be crazy"),

An English student of mine told me she and a friend found a list of these online and, as she said in proper Denglish, "We almost laughed us dead."

So I told her how when Guido Westerwelle first became Germany's foreign minister, people started making fun of his supposedly terrible English by inventing quotes with everything translated hyperliterally. His very name, for example, becomes "Westerwave." As for his job title, foreign minister is "Aussenminister" in German, and generally speaking "aussen" doesn't mean foreign so much as "external" or "outside."

...Thus we have Mr. Westerwave, the Outside Minister.

(That's right, this is what it was! Someone set up this Twitter account dedicated to Denglish-y supposed Westerwelle quotes. The subheading – "I'm always yet the new germany outside minister. No one can reach me the water!" – is Denglish for "I'm still the new German foreign minister. No one can hold a candle to me!")

I just read through some of that Twitter feed and, yes, pretty much laughed me dead...