[nhaehnle]

Native speaker of German here.

"Klatsch" is not "small talk", it's "gossip".

"Gerede" is a word that I've only heard in debates to suggest that something is not to be taken seriously, i.e. it has serious negative connotations. Perhaps it used to mean "small talk" in the past when Germans did such things, and then changed to have the negative meaning when small talk fell out of favour? Of course, the German word "Smalltalk" also tends to be used negatively ;)

[Vivtek]

If you start getting into negative/positive connotations and meditate on them enough, you'll find that nothing at all can ever be translated between any two languages - then if you continue to meditate, you'll find that no actual communication ever takes place at all.

Speaking as a professional translator.

The actual difference between "small talk" and "gossip" is slight enough that they easily overlap depending on the situation. Certainly they show that the German language is capable of conceptualizing the various rituals that we refer to as small talk.

Just because English has no precise translation for "Gemütlichkeit" doesn't mean that English speakers never feel comfortable among a small circle of friends at a restaurant.

I'd also like to say that after many years of living in Germany, I'd say that the notion that no small talk ever takes place within the borders of the country is ridiculous. It might not be taken to the extreme art form that the Brits do it, but H. sapiens talks. Incessantly. Whether there's something to talk about or not.

[lispm]

Unterhaltung

Konversation

[barry-cotter]

Both of those could be applied to any conversational exchange, whether information was really being exchanged or not, and smalltalk is heavily weighted towards the "not".

It's not what you say, but how you say it. /exaggeration

[mhd]

Schwatz, Plausch, Plauderei, Tratsch? And as we're getting very informal here, local dialects take over. Which is one of the reason why "small talk", sounding a bit more high-brow, was so easily adopted.

[barry-cotter]

Dear God, I don't recognise a single one of those. But what about people from areas that might have local slang but don't have a dialect, like Niedersachsen or (bits of) the Rhineland? And what about the university attending classes, who are much more likely to become free-floating German instead of being rooted to anyplace particular?

[mhd]

Germans from beyond the Danube are cold heartless people who don't chat. No, seriously, I'm not really an expert when it comes to dialects, and there doesn't seem to be a proper etymological German dictionary online. And just because they don't appear to have a dialect (which is wrong anyway, it's just that their dialect is now "proper" German) doesn't meant that there aren't slang words. And it seems that a lot of the words for chit-chat area onomatopoeic...

Just saying that there are words for mindless chatter that don't mean gossip per se (i.e gossipy "Klatsch" vs. chatty "Tratsch").

[lispm]

No, 'sich mit jemanden unterhalten', is smalltalk. 'Konversation treiben' is a form of that. In Hamburg 'schnackt man mit jemanden'.