If that's the case, a simple "Good girl! You can collect your prize now." would have suffice.
Yes and no. In English maybe, in German not really.
Slow me down if I go too deep, but it is one of my pet peeves in how both languages are often taught, which makes it harder for the non-native learners. English and German go back to the same West-Germanic dialect, but since the time of Middle English and Middle High German the differences have grown massivly.
One such difference is English developed a rigid SVO sentence structure with very little possible variance. German developed into a Verb Second (finite verb only) language in main clauses with just one verb (in an ironic twist the German main clause is, despite so frequent, one big grammar exception) and Verb Final in all other cases. In German only the verb positions are fixed, everything else can be and is varied. So while simple sentences like "I eat soup"/"Ich esse Suppe" look very similar, their underlying grammar is very different, which emerges quickly once sentences are not so simple any longer.
German sentences transmit meaning in part through word order changes, which is hard to translate into English, since the rigid word order there cannot display these meaning differences. One famous example for this difference is that Yoda ralk from Star Wars in the German version has to be translated intentionally wrong to sound unusual, because the English original talk of Yoda is a rarer but valid word order in German and not the least unusual to German ears.
Another big difference between the two languages you do not see directly is that the sentence structure has massive influence in how you construct a sentence and esp. the thought sequence behind it. The early and compact subject-verb complex of English and other SVO languages makes it very "action-oriented" with a tendency for very short sentences. You get told early on that somebody does something and then (maybe) a bit more about it.
German is a Verb Final language at it´s heart like e.g. Japanese, Hittite, Hindi, Persian, Afrikaans or Mongolian. These languages are "story-oriented" with a tendency for longer and more complex sentences. You get first told the situation at hand and then what is done.
This type of storytelling also forms a part what and how Ocean writes his story and how this story gets translated into English. There is always a kind of conceptual clarity blurring in any type of translation and I really hope to one day being able to read Ocean´s original German version in full.
I could go on longer, for example about how for a long time it was official school policy to bring the pupils to use the full variability and features of German, which lead to the situation that Ocean and I grew up with the ideal to use our mothertongue like she should. So simple does not cut it for about 3 centuries in German. The currently longest correct German sentence is 1077 words long. Nothing for the normal day to day life, but just to show what is possible.
This does change so, the current generation is pushing "Dolt German" and "Denglish", a German even EEG flatliners can speak.
I guess the word "penis" is not what it used to be. Too memeable. Thank you, Internet.
The internet is one of the most obvious examples that everything can be both a boon and a curse.
And thanks Turret for shedding some light into this. Seems to me you should be the one translating the game to English.
Thank you for your kind words, but I think this will not happen!
I am a hobby writer and have translated stories out. You might believe it or not, but a subset of the readers commenting on my stories go on and on how bad my English translations of my German stories are. Few of those are even able to read German. So while I can get by with my English, I still have doubts I am a good translator.
