[specialist]

> STOP translating directly from German

Is this an option in German business culture? Are Germans open to conveying the (mere) gist of a sentence?

Ages ago, we translated our manufacturing software to German. Our German team were an absolute joy to work with. They were so thorough, they'd correct our English, and then translate to German. In other words, our German translators caught mistakes missed by our own technical writers. So awesome.

I'm not sure the reverse is even possible, culturally. Can a German marketing and PR firm accept a localized version of their message? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer brand. And the German brands I do know -- BMW, Mercedes, Kraftwerk -- don't much use words for marketing. They don't need to.

[yobbo]

> I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer brand

NIVEA, Braun, Miele, Bosch, Birkenstock, various chocolates ... and so on. Lots of marketing in awkward English.

[specialist]

Heh. True.

Let me try again...

Bullshit is hard to translate. Culturally, German branding may have comparatively less bullshit. And therefore less compulsion to translate nuance. Just describe what the product does.

Amazon recruiting will say stuff like "code ninjas needed to invent future!" Versus "get beaten like a rented mule for two years, to make Bezos even more rich, then fall over dead". (How would one translate either version?)

This LIDL/Schwartz pitch, perfectly normal for America, comes off kinda weird, like maybe satire, from a German company.