Selbstbild may be a fairly easy word to translate: self-image, but Fremdbild, that's a whole other ball game. It's been researched on this forum all the way back to 2001, and nobody seems to have ever come up with a simple, easy term. I think it could be translated as "how others see us" or "perceive us," but there doesn't seem to be a singular, catchy, one-word translation. In my humble opinion, Fremdbild could and maybe should be standing on its own. It's catchy and almost untranslatable, like the ever popular Doppelgänger, or Zeitgeist, etc.

...'They seem to picture me as arrogant'

So könnte man es doch umschreiben?

the concept of Eigen/Fremdbild as described by you strikes me as peculiar to start with... as kai explained, it is a question of perception which we have of ourselves or others have of us.

this reminds me of the T-Shirt stating: If I come across as an arrogant bastard, that's because I am one.
(rare case of Fremdbild and Selbstbild being identical...)

nice one...

self-perception vs. perception of the external observer

@P.Z.: Für (Fremdbild) -s. Frage - ist uns leider noch nichts eingefallen... ;o)

I advise strongly against translating Fremdbild as Fremdbild. English speaking psychology has survived for over a century without it. It's totally translatable (unlike Zeitgeist), just not as one word because (I think) English is not as addicted as German is to expressing concepts in one word. A phrase works just as well and the one I have seen in hundreds of psych reports is "others see him/her as...."

@rV: of course Fremdbild is translatable; pretty much anything is, if you use enough words to circumscribe it (yes, even Zeitgeist). I was merely saying that, like Zeitgeist, Doppelgänger, Blitzkrieg, and many other lovely German terms the English language has absorbed, Fremdbild could easily be one of them. It’s catchy, short, and well understood, I think. Germans, on the other hand, are very good at expressing almost anything in one word, because they can avail themselves of the compound noun, something English usually frowns upon. May I mention as a “quick” example the Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenabzeichen... (and so forth, and so on, ad nauseam).

Refers to groups rather than individuals:
autostereotype vs heterostereotype

For individuals:
self-concept vs. perception by (important) others

Agree with rv ... I'd steer clear in this case (as in many others) of the German predilection for nouns.

For two relatively short phrases that describe these terms in contrasting, fully understandable words, I'd say:

How I see myself / How others see me

hazardous terrain, indeed... but will give it a(n amateurish) shot , all the same:

self-image / (the) perceived public image

disclaimer: this is a 'dabbler's-version', a 'patchwork of sorts' (see previous posting from r.r.robin) - 'es wird kein Anspruch auf Richtigkeit erhoben'.

I've also read "third-party perception" (who's the second?) and "person perception"

Probem being if you have a colum of only a few charaters in a questionnaire and you want to express "Fremdbild" in a short term to keep the format of the document /table clean and orderly!

Then I would gladly absorb "Fremdbild" into the English language. Pragmatism should win the day!

I just ended two sentences in the previous post with exclamation marks!

Argh!

opps!


doh!

"O wad some Power the giftie gi' us
To see ourselves as others see us!"

I think Robert Burns also managed perfectly well without artificial nouns.

Could this work?