Cultural competence in translation: Geography

This is the first in a series of posts looking at how my translations are informed by cultural competence, i.e., my knowledge and lived experience of both German-speaking and English-speaking culture. Here, I look at an example of how the geography of a country or region figures in the imagination of its people, and how translators may need to take this into account in their work.

Which do you prefer: the beach or the mountains? If you are from the UK, you might never have thought about this, and may even be slightly perplexed by the question – why beach versus mountains, what about other types of landscape? In Germany though, this is a classic either/or question like “cats or dogs” or “baths or showers”. And when you look at Germany’s geography, it’s easy to see why this might be: at the northern end of the country are the Baltic and North Sea coasts with their sandy beaches and rows of Strandkörber, while to the south loom the majestic peaks of the Alps, one of the world’s most famous mountain ranges. Two ends of the country, two completely different landscapes and indeed, two distinct regional identities.

In Spain, too, the question of playa o montaña is an important one thanks to the country’s hot climate – surviving the scorching summers means seeking refuge either in cooler mountainous regions, or on the beach in the shade of a sun umbrella.

As for the UK, it isn’t short on coastline, and you’re never too far from the sea, so a day or weekend at the beach is affordable and accessible to most. Trips to the seaside hold an important place in the popular imagination, mountain sojourns less so: Britain has its bens, hills, fells and downs, but beautiful as these are, they can’t be said to have quite the draw of the Alps. It follows that “beach or mountains” isn’t a particularly relevant choice.

This differing significance of mountains in the German and British imagination was something I thought about when I came across the phrase “haben Sie schon mal daran gedacht, Ihre Teams in die Berge zu schicken?” in a promotion for air purifiers aimed at those running small-to-medium-sized companies in the UK. The phrase translates as “have you ever thought about sending your teams to the mountains?”, and the idea was that the air purifiers offered benefits similar to those of breathing fresh mountain air. For the reasons outlined above, it occurred to me that the answer from a UK-based company boss would probably be “nope, never!”, rendering the question rather silly.

What to do? I had limited options, since the artwork for the advertisement featured a snowy Alpine peak and there was no possibility of changing this for the UK version of the campaign. So I decided to tweak the phrasing of the opening line slightly: “Wouldn’t it be nice to send your staff for a break in the mountains?”. It is a subtle difference, but I think it “softens” the assumption in the original that trips to the mountains are a part of the reader’s ordinary frame of reference.

Without adapting the text to specific aspects of UK geography, I moved it away slightly from the specifics of the geography of the German-speaking world. This hopefully ensures that the phrase does not strike UK-based readers as odd, which is always my goal when applying cultural knowledge to my translations – an advert that leaves its audience baffled is unlikely to be effective.

I would love to know your thoughts on this: do you agree with the slight change I made in my translation or do you think a more literal translation would have been fine – or perhaps you think I stuck too closely to the original? And is the beach vs mountain question an important one where you come from?