A Question for My German-Speaking Friends

[billroper]

How would you say in German the following two short sentences?

Take 2006 Sales.
Subtract 2006 Cost of Goods Sold.

(In this case, 2006 means the value of the Sales account in the year 2006, if that's not clear from context.)

Thanks!

Comments

[katyhh.livejournal.com]

Ummm ... why do you need to say that in German? *g*
I'd say:

(using formal speech)
Nehmen Sie die Verkaufszahlen/den Verkaufswert von 2006.
Ziehen Sie die Kosten (Beschaffungskosten?) der verkauften Waren ab.

That is a literal translation. More natural would be:

"Verkaufswert 2006 abzüglich der Kosten für verkaufte Waren".

What do you need it for? So that I could maybe give you a more appropriate translation; this one was of the top of my head ...

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

Literal translation without context is always very difficult. But I think Katy's got the best possible translation.

[bardling.livejournal.com]

Agreed entirely. :)

[billroper]

Our product has a feature where you can see the formula for a calculation displayed in English. Instead of:

v1040 = v1000(2006) - v1020(2006)

You see:

Take 2006 Sales 1472.14
Subtract 2006 Cost of Goods Sold 984.72

(Those numbers should be correctly aligned, but I'm too lazy to do an HTML table.)

"Sales" would be the name of v1000, while "Cost of Goods Sold" is the name of v1020. The sentences are produced by concatenating together all of the information to make an English language sentence.

Did I mention that we're in the process of localizing our product in German, French, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese? :)

It turns out that producing sentences by concatenation is one of those things that gives linguists fits. Now, I provide a certain amount of control over word order for each language, so you can put the verb on either side of the subject in the sentence, but I occasionally get things that make me a bit nuts coming in.

Yesterday's comment from the German linguist was that I needed to preface all of the date references such as "2006" or "Jan06" with the German for "the year" or "the month", which is something we wouldn't even consider in English.

And I notice that you didn't do it either. :)

We know we're going to have problems with gender, because there's no way to encode that for all of the accounts in our product. (At least today.) But I'd like to make the translation as good as possible, within reason.

So I figured I'd cheat and ask my friends for a second opinion.

Thanks!

[poltr1]

Here's what the Babelfish had to say:

Verkäufe Des Nehmen-2006. Subtrahieren Sie Kosten 2006 verkaufte Waren.

[katyhh.livejournal.com]

I hope you're not upset if I say that Babelfish really is less than useful for proper translations ...

[poltr1]

I'm not upset at all. Machine-translated language is like machine-generated food. It may get the job done, but it is in no way appetizing. :)