One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.
There is no exactly matching equivalent in German. You might say something like 'this isn't about you', but there is no term for calling someone out on it so beautifully and bluntly.
But to me it makes no sense to make absolute statements on conciseness. In my opinion societies are concise in language on topics on which a great common focus lies upon.
Not a 100% word for word translation, but what I would yell when I meant to say something similar to the English version. Instead of "make it (about you)" I switch to something that reverse-translated ends up more like "it is not about you" because trying to use the "make" part in a 100% word for word translation does not seem to lead to anything I as a German might say. Still, I'd say my version actually is an accurate translation, so I would dispute your claim that "there is no exactly matching equivalent in German".
> One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.
As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.
As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other. I don't know if this inconsistency is due to limits in my own knowledge or limits in each language, but I suspect it's a bit of both. Where things appear more concise to native speakers also probably has to do with both tacit knowledge of idioms and amount of time spent composing a deliberately aphoristic statement.
>As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other.
I'm reminded of my former neighbors, who would switch between English and Spanish mid-sentence. I asked them about it once and they expressed a sentiment similar to yours.
As an English and German speaker, my kids would tell you I sometimes do the same thing. Bad drivers get yelled at in German ;-D
German is more concise and can specialize the nouns much better than in english.
But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to understand and not as baroque as the german form.
In Japanese forced with the same problem of having to import many new foreign terms ("lehnworte"), they chose a better way, Katakana, which is almost as well modernized as Korean. In German it backfired, and instead of chosing modern shorter and more precise forms, they want for the longer nouns, adding to it.
> But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language.
I can believe that if you translate texts that are written in idiomatic English into German, they get longer.
On the other hand, if you have a concisely written scientific text in German, translating it into English leads to something between gibberish and something barely readable. So you often have to completely rewrite/reexpress large parts of the text so that it looks like idiomatic English.
Having been involved in writing internationalised software, you can get into trouble if you don't leave enough space for your labels, button captions, messages etc to be translated into another language which may requires 10-50% more space.
This is partly a consequence of these languages using the alphabet that was designed to serve a different language. (Another striking example is Vietnamese.)
