Slang "no brainer" -- a challenge for translators

[Chris F Waigl]

Wilson Gray wrote:

>
> When I was in the Army in Germany in the early 'Sixties, I was
> surprised to hear Germans say, "Das ist nicht _fair_!" Like, they
> don't have a word for "fair"? Apparently not. A glance into the
> current Langenscheidt's shows that "fair" is still the word for
> "fair," with a version of the German pronunciation assimilated to the
> spelling now acceptable, but the pswaydo-English pronunciation is
> still preferred.

Well, you're joining hordes of German youngsters who laugh about English
not having a word for "kaputt". (Not that "kaputt" wasn't borrowed from
French into German in the first place.)

Seriously, though, it isn't surprising to me at all, with a legal system
based on the Code Napoléon and therefore very differently structured
than that that grew out of the English and American traditions, that the
notion of fairness, which is central here doesn't have as much clout
there. For most uses, _gerecht_ ("just") does sort of work well enough.
I'd speculate that _unfair_ was a motor for the borrowing because it is
much more versatile (and less formal) than _ungerecht_. And then there's
the entire sports angle with the English reputation for fairness.

The DWDS-Corpus, which starts in 1900, has "fair" from 1902 and _unfair_
from 1910. In project Gutenberg I find both in a number of works from
the first two decades of the 20th century (among which, Bebel's
memoirs). We can safely assume that the borrowing took place before
1900. TLFi has "fair-play" in French with a cite from 1856.

So yes, German does have a word for "fair": _fair_. It's been around for
generations.

Chris Waigl

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