Living corpse is my translation of "lebender Leichnam," a term which is at the base of explaining "vampires." vampire could also be a reanimated corpse.

Auch: http://mitglied.lycos.de/Sethos72/vtm-ghule.htm

I've seen this translation in a couple of fantasy books.

Cf. - http://www.leo.org/cgi-bin/dict/forum/forum.c...

Have your pick:
A zombie is the animated corpse of somebody killed by a practitioner of Voudoun (aka Voodoo).
A ghoul is an undead creature risen from the grave to consume the flesh of the dead.
Both zombies and ghouls have a physical body and are not just apparitions.
A revenant is an undead (variously with physical body or without) come back from the grave to perform an unfinished task.
A wraith is the malovent spirit of a deceased person.
A ghost is the generic name for an undead phantom.
A poltergeist is the residual life force of a deceased person that plays various tricks (from chilling to lethal) on the living. It is generally mindless.
A specter is a vengeful spirit risen to destroy those it deems responsible for its death.
A shade is a mere apparation appearing at the site of its death.
A lich is an undead necromancer (a magician dealing with the undead) twisted by his evil art to exist beyond physical death.
A lemure is the name given to Roman ancestral spirits, which inhabit the houses of their descendants (and should be honored with gifts).
A banshee (Bean Sidhe) is not an undead ghost at all, but a fey of the Tuatha de Danaan (a mytholgical tribe of Ireland) come to warn about and/or proclaim the death of a family member. It supposedly only appears to those of Irish descent.

All of these definitions are naturally unprecise and may vary from place to place or in the writing of various authors.

Wiedergänger:
When a person dies he or she is dead and never returns (unless by reincarnation), however, some of them do return and this people were called Wiedergänger, which means "back-comers", a dead person can become a wiedergänger when he is evil, dies an unnatural death, or simply because he does not know that he is dead.
The Wiedergänger can come out of the ground and disappear into it again, some of the more evil Wiedergängers also kill humans and animals, the bodies of their victims do not show any wounds but simply turn blue and stiff.

Ich würde Wiedergänger gar nicht übersetzen, sondern (back-comers) allenfalls in Klammern dahinter stellen. Das ist so ein schönes deutsches Wort.

NOTICE: Any similarity between the words occurring in this thread and persons living or dead (or both) -- but specifically my nick -- are purely coincidental and of no significance whatsoever.

Marianne: good idea -- wouldn't "wieder" and "gänger" be better translated, say, as "again" and "walker"?

I'm using this thread, because I'm also looking for a translation of "Wiedergänger".

Can I indeed use the German word? I would like to use it in my Master Thesis and (being a German and writing it for a German university) I wonder what sound more professional. I'd probably rather use "revenant" If I use "Wiedergänger", it looks like I was too lazy to find a good translation, doesn't it?

considering that the word "doppelgänger" exists in the English language, I'd think "wiedergänger isn't too much of a stretch.

Thank you very much. You advice and the link has been very useful.

auch wenn es sehr spät komt: im Zweifel hat die englische Wikipediaseite aber auf jeden Fall eine Seite, die "Wiedergänger" behandelt, also kann es nicht allzu falsch sein es unübersetzt zu lassen