| Kommentar | I'm reading a book about the new physics, Lisa Randall's Knocking on Heaven's Door, and side-by-side its translation into German, Die Vermessung des Universums ("Aus dem Amerikanischen von Jürgen Schröder", 2013). From Chapter 3:
1a. When we cook food, we evaluate if fish is flaky, if the center of a cake is dry, if oatmeal is mushy, or if a soufflé has risen. But unless we practice molecular gastronomy, we rarely pay attention to the buried atomic structure responsible for these changes.
1b. Wenn wir Essen kochen, beurteilen wir, ob der Fisch Schuppen hat, ob die Mitte eines Kuchens trocken ist, ob die Haverflocken breiig sind oder ob das Soufflé aufgegangen ist. Aber falls wir keine molekulare Gastronomie betreiben, beachten wir selten die verborgene atomare Struktur, die für diese Veränderungen verantwortlich ist.
* backtranslating the German, I get "whether the fish has scales." But that is not what the original English means. "Flaky" here means that the flesh of the fish falls apart in easily separable layers. What would the correct German be? flockig? blätchenförmig?
* To translate "unless we practice X," I think I would have written "es sei denn, wir X betreiben." Here the translator has written instead "falls wir kein X betreiben." Are these expressions equivalent, and is one more idiomatic than the other here? |
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