Casual Conversation

There's layers of hilarity for me.

1. The introduce German vocabulary, like the "Wesen" that are at the heart of the show. It's the right word, note: it means "creature" or "being" or other such words. But they pronounce it like "VESS-en", instead of the proper way of saying it which sounds more like "VAY-zen". Thus they're pronouncing what is arguably the core word of the show as if it meant "whose" instead of "creature". This makes me laugh. Constantly.

2. There's a whole host of comical errors in the "German" words for the "VESS-en"(🤣):

• Blutbad: The name for werewolves, translates to "bloodbath". So far so good. Perhaps a poetic name to show the deadliness of the creatures. But in plural they call them "Blutbaden" which would mean "bathing in blood". The word they were actually looking for was "Blutbäder".

• Jägerbär: This is a werebear and is intended to mean "hunter-bear". Which is fine. Except when it shows up in writing it's spelled "Jägerbar" (and it's pronounced that way about half the time too), meaning "hunter's bar". As in the place you get your drinks if you're a hunter. (It also sometimes shows up as "Jagerbar" which ... doesn't seem to mean anything I can figure out.)

• Ziegevolk: Supposed to mean "goat people" but it should be "Ziegenvolk" (plural: "Ziegenvölker").

• Fuchsbau: Supposed to mean "foxhole" but this is not a word that has any supernatural connotations in German. It's literally the word for a fox burrow. (It's telling that the rarely-seen German dub of the show changes it to Fuchsteufel: literally fox-devil.)

• And a cast of thousands. Most of the "Wesen" names are wrong. They're what happens when someone comes up with a "cool name" in English and translates it word for word into German with a German-English dictionary, unaware that other languages aren't just one-for-one mappings with English vocabulary, grammar, and idiom.

3. The real comedy sets in, however, when they started introducing real German speakers (and "real" German speakers) into the story. In the first two seasons or so, the only foreign languages they inserted for any length of time were French and Spanish. (I can't judge the Spanish except peripherally: it seemed fine, but the French ranged from competent to exquisite.) But in the third season they set some things in Germany and had "native" (and native) German speakers talking. Some of these "German speakers" spoke such a badly-corrupted German it was impossible to work out what they were actually saying; it was somehow worse than the "Chinese" in Firefly(!). But the true comedy gold is when real German speakers had to speak the lines. Because for consistency's sake they had to mispronounce words and misuse words that were already in canon ... and you could SEE in their faces how uncomfortable it all was to say "VESS-en" for "Wesen". (I suspect there were a lot of reshoots because the actual Germans kept screwing up their lines using correct German pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.)

Now don't get me wrong here. I like the show. I'm enjoying watching it. I just find the cringeworthy German to be a layer of unintentional comedy gold atop a series that's pretty entertaining in its own right. It's just the victim of what commonly comes from unilingual writers in any language (though anglophones have a far higher proportion of unilingualism than most other language groups).

See, this is what happens. The writers come up with a neat turn of the phrase or a cool vocabulary item in their native language. (Fair enough. It's literally the language they think in.) Then they ask the wrong question:

• How would I say <phrase/word/whatever> in ?

And they'll go to a native speaker and ask that, without context. Or they'll go to a language dictionary and translate it manually. Or they'll go to Google Translate. Or these days maybe to ChatGPT. And what comes out is a literal translation (that might even be an accurate literal translation!) ... that is nonetheless gibberish in the target language. (Pronunciation is another thing entirely, and I cut some slack there because actors are not going to always be polyglots; indeed rarely are.)

So to illustrate, let's take a common English expression: "Who gives a shit?" I'll translate it into three languages literally:

• Qui donne une merde ?
• Wer gibt eine Scheiße?
• 谁给一坨屎？ (Shéi gěi yī tuó shǐ?)

All three of these are 100% accurate translations of the expression. NONE of them have any meaning in their target language. French, German, and Chinese speakers, if they didn't know the English expression, would blink uncomprehendingly at you trying to figure out if you've just had an aneurysm or something. See, the proper, idiomatic translation is more like this:

• On s'en fout. (Literally "we don't care" but used in the space that "who gives a shit?" is placed.)
• Wen interessiert's? (Literally "who's interested?") / Mir doch egal ("I don't care anyway") depending on which way "who gives a shit?" is being used. (Recall what I said about one-to-one mapping....)
• 谁在乎？(Shéi zài hū?) / 我才不在乎呢。(Wǒ cái bù zài hū ne) depending on how dismissive you want to be in Chinese. The first means "who cares?" and the second, far harsher, means "I don't care at all".

So for a show to not become an unintentional comedy like Grimm became for me, the writers would either have to stay in their lane and not try to introduce German, or they would have had to actively collaborate with a German native-level speaker to find out how actual GERMANS would say things.