For most English speakers, German is more difficult to translate than Spanish or French. Why? It has all those endings and the sentences are longer. They are also more complicated, really. This is what makes it such a challenge for art history graduate students who need to pass their German translation exam, often in a hurry. Still, approaching German the right way, they can get access to your secret code pretty quickly.

At the heart of cracking the German translation code is something called a “case”. The case is basically a tool that marks each noun or noun phrase in a sentence with respect to the role it plays in that sentence.

For example, there is a case marker indicating “subject”. Another points to “object”. And so.

English no longer has case endings, so you must rely on word order to signal the functions of nouns in a sentence.

For example, the following two sentences in English mean very different things:

1) The dog chased the canary.

2) The canary chased the dog.

That’s because the word order tells us who is chasing and who is being chased. In languages ​​with long case endings, things are different. In German, for example, the sentences might read like this:

3) Der Hund jagte den Kanarienvogel.

4) Den Kanarienvogel jagte der Hund.

5) Den Hund jagte der Kanarienvogel.

6) Der Kanarienvogel jagte den Hund.

Look at the articles. “Der” indicates that the noun phrase with that marker is the subject, while “den” indicates that it is the object. And in our examples 3) and 4), “der” is paired with the dog (Hund), and “den” is paired with the canary (Kanarienvogel). This means that the dog is chasing and the canary is escaping.

In examples 5) and 6), however, the articles have been interchanged. This results in a very different image: the canary is now chasing the dog,

Again, both versions mean the same thing. Notice how now the case of the object goes with the dog, and therefore the dog is the one being chased. Why thing one over the other? Whichever noun clause the sentence begins with, it is generally considered to be the known entity or thing the sentence is about. The rest of the sentence tells us what is happening to the thing (or person or animal) that the sentence is about. Something like this: sentence 5) is about the dog and what the dog is doing. Sentence 6) is about the canary and what is happening with the canary. If you want to do this type of highlighting in English, you have to resort to the passive:

7) The canary was chased by the dog.

Or worse:

8) It was the canary that the dog was chasing.

So far so good. You think you can handle that. But what makes this really challenging is the fact that there are three different genders in German, so there are three different sets of case endings. Not only that, but all three genders are randomly assigned to words.

So the only way to understand what is what is to memorize the words WITH their corresponding articles. Either that, or you have to look up a lot of words. That’s because you must know the gender of the word to be sure of the case. And you need to know the case to be sure who is doing what in the sentence.

And the reason the last part is so hard to figure out is that the Germans, having a case to indicate who is doing what, don’t rely on word order to do the same thing, as we’ve seen in the examples above. This lets the word order do a different job: emphasize, smooth transitions, and indicate which is the topic of the award and which is the comment.

And that is one of the keys that makes German more challenging in a translation test, whether it is Art History, Physics or Philosophy. Still, if you learn the articles as part of every noun, and have their case endings, you’re way ahead of the game.