Re: German language in anime

On Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:08:12 +0200, Kurt Bernhard Pruenner wrote:

Phil Yff wrote:
Yes Panzer Kunst is a form of martial arts. Panzer is German for an
armored vehicle like a tank.

Well, it is - among other things, like "casing", "shell" or "armour
plate"...

http://dict.leo.org/ende?search=panzer

So I'm not quite sure that it was meant to be a translation of "tank"...

Probably not. I would simply leave it as Panzer Kunst. Since I agree with
you that panzer was not meant to be a translation of tank, when I
translated it, I translated it as armored machine arts. The word 'machine'
could refer to a vehicle and it could also apply to robots and cyborgs. I
felt that way, I could be faithful to the original connotations of the
German word as well as be consistent with how the term is used in the anime
and manga. Why didn't I translate it simply as armored arts as your
dictionary definition suggests?

Dictionaries are sometimes deceiving. Panzer comes from the middle German
Panzier and hypothetically could refer to armor. However, you rarely, if
ever, see it used that way in German. There are other German words that
would be used if you wanted to refer specifically to armor in isolation
rather than on a fighting vehicle. After I checked your online dictionary
definition, I went to my hardcopy German to German dictionary. This is the
definition it gave for panzer:

Der Panzer: Kurz für der Panzerkampfwagen (Short for armored combat
vehicle). It went on to give the etymology and some examples all of which
referred to armored fighting vehicles.

Since Panzer Kunst is a fictitious martial art form developed on Mars, I
would leave it in German and not translate it. However, if you do want to
translate it and want to precisely incorporate the connotations in modern
German usage, you should associate panzer with fighting vehicles.
Nevertheless, I am sure that Kishiro (the author) was not an expert on
German usage, so I would accept the interpretation that Panzer Kunst could
be translated as armored arts.

Mata ato de,

Phil Yff


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Collections Confiscated - Coin Collectors criminalized
    ... Indicate language to translate to. ... (German to English) ... entire collections of antique coins, if provenance of only a few ... their collections have provenances that will satisfy the new laws. ...
    (rec.collecting.coins)
  • Re: opening a file
    ... We mean that the pejorative is fortran elsewhere to practice. ... sounds about as wrong in English as the original sounds wrong in German. ... Speakers) and no Perl programmer would write a script like Mirco's ... can't translate literally from one programming language to another. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)
  • Re: Stanley, try this trick
    ... to translate from English to French then you learn English and French. ... German and then German to French. ...
    (rec.music.classical.guitar)
  • Thank you: Seeking Help with Photo Caption
    ... Thanks to everyone who attempted to translate this caption! ... there is not total agreement over the exact version of German or exactly ... same web site where the photo caption was displayed, ... on Jewish Genealogy ...
    (soc.genealogy.jewish)
  • Re: Stanley, try this trick
    ... to translate from English to French then you learn English and French. ... German and then German to French. ...
    (rec.music.classical.guitar)