English available

Starting today, the stories are also available in an English translation.

However, there is a small catch.

The translated stories are based on a machine translation from German into English. That alone would be too low-quality for me to inflict on my English-speaking readers. So I compared the original version and the translation side by side, checked every single sentence for the desired message and corrected errors made by the machine.

In my opinion, the result reads smoothly and sounds good.

However, English is not my native language. My English is perhaps good enough for blog articles (like this one) and conversations, but certainly not for light fiction.

So I am hoping for feedback from native speakers. Until then, there is a note that the text has not yet been proofread by an English speaker.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that this translation is better than nothing at all. Enjoy reading!

PS: Translation Errors

The machine made a few remarkable mistakes.

For example, it translated “halb fünf” (half past four, literally “half five”) to “half past five”.

Another time, the machine sneaked an information into a literal speech that was revealed much later in the original text. This was not easy to spot, because the translation was factually correct, it was just the wrong timing. I only noticed this difference in the synoptic comparison.

All in all, a machine translation is a very good basis, but should never be used without checking.

PPS: Language Quality

I decided to use machine translation for the stories only, but to write the blog articles directly in English. This is because I don’t want to hide the fact that English is my second language. I think it’s more enjoyable to read an authentic text instead of a machine translation that would make me sound more linguistically gifted than I am. 😉

So please don’t be repelled by the language quality of the blog articles. For the stories, I did my best to deliver a good quality that is as close to the German original as possible.