Native German speakers - NPR this morning- shoddy translation?

[LynzM]

I was listening to Morning Edition this morning and they had a piece on 'Honor Killings' Plague Germany's Turkish Community

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4565134

"In Berlin, six young Turkish women have been murdered in the past five months in "honor killings." The most recent incident involved a woman shot on the street by her brothers. Police say the women were killed because their traditional, conservative families believe the women had become too Western."

During the course of the story, they interviewed several people, most of whom spoke English well.

However, later in the piece, they interviewed someone who spoke in German. Her bit in German started with "Es gibt natuerlich Organisationen..." which then faded into a voice-over in English "There are many Islamic organizations here which don't approve..."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the adjective for "islamic" have to come before Organisationen? Did they just add that in? Am I just over-reaching here?

[salvorhardin]

1. Es gibt natürlich islamische Organisationen... n/t

[JDPriestly]

2. The snippet that was audible

does not contain the adjectives "viele" (many) or "Islamische" (Islamic), but, they may have been used later in the sentence. It would not be unusual for a German to say "Es gibt, naturlich, Organisationen, viele, hauptsachlich Islamische . . . . " There are, of course, organizations, many, primarily Islamic, . . . ." The translation could be correct. You can't tell.

[LynzM]

3. Yeah...

Just wanted to check. It seemed from that snippet and a couple others that it wasn't very good translation work, but without hearing all of it, I guess you can't tell. Just seemed kinda weird. Thanks.

[reorg]

4. the translation is factually correct, even if the spokesperson didn't say

verbatim that MANY TURKISH organisations don't approve of the "Western lifestyle". There are indeed many very conservative Turkish organisations in Germany, and I would hazard the guess that most of them strongly disapprove of certain lifestyles ... like our own parents did, up until the sixties.

With respect to these so-called "honor" killings, these organisations used to distance themselves by merely pointing out that this has nothing to do with Islam and even is a sin. Which is correct, but obviously doesn't stop some backward idiots to stab their own sisters and daughters because they deem them to be sluts. As is pointed out in the program, and according to what I read, it is only recently that the Turkish Federation (Türkische Gemeinde Deutschlands) has openly come out to CONDEMN these killings and promised to do something about this problem (awkwardly: "is it especially important to cleanse the visual and print media of themes that approve of honor killings and violence in the name of regional cultures" - "ist es insbesondere wichtig, die Printmedien und die visuellen Medien von den Motiven zu reinigen, die Ehrenmorde und Gewalt im Namen von regionalen Kulturen für gut heißen.)

One has to point out, though, that some blame also rests with the German judiciary. Bound to respect "cultural idiosyncrasies", honor killings were generally treated as second degree murder (Totschlag) carrying the maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

[LynzM]

5. Thanks for the info

I personally cannot imagine killing a relative for something like 'living too much like a german', etc., but obviously some people do feel that strongly about it.

The piece also said that there was criticsm that the TGD didn't speak out earlier and more strongly against these killings.

How do non-Turkish Germans generally feel about this issue, do you know? Do they feel that the judiciary should be changed to consider these as first-degree murder?

[Iterate]

6. Cross cultural tolerance is a big issue

I saw this particular issue covered on the local news, I think as recently as last week. There have been several excellent, very sensitive, 30-60 minute reports on the topic and that must have prompted the NPR report.

I wish sometimes those pieces could simply be subtitled and shown in the US.

I would be the first to say that I don't understand all that I know, but let me try my best. As background, the general issue of cultural tolerance, where you draw the line when something isn't acceptable, and how different cultures can be integrated is a long-term topic for discussion all across Europe. There isn't a week that goes by without several references to it in the press, as a conference topic, subject of a book fair, etc.

In Germany it tends to be focused around the integration of Turkish immigrants and guest workers. To American ears this debate sounds like a very slow and thoughtful pondering, not an 'end-of-the-world' crisis, or call for rabid behavior and no compromise attitudes. Officials seem to be very slow to react to any new issue and will wait for a consensus to form.

This issue of honor killings is a bit more clear-cut. There's no doubt in the attitudes of officials or ordinary citizens that the crime itself won't be tolerated. There isn't any doubt about the 'wrongness' of it with anyone, Turk or German, with whom I interact.

There is however a separation of the crime from the culture -and a great reluctance to interfere with another culture. The net result is likely to be slow pressure on the more separated communities to deal with the root causes themselves, with publicity, law, and police acting on the outside.

I'll have to think more about it, pay more attention, put it on my 'what's going on here?' list.

[LynzM]

7. It will be interesting to see

It makes sense to me that cross-cultural sensitivity, and a long-term discussion of how to achieve tolerance, and what constitutes tolerance vs. permissiveness, would be ongoing in Europe. There are many more cultures (or at least, a real recognition of many cultures) there, in a much smaller space, than the US deals with. It's easier here for groups to segregate themselves, I think.

I'll be interested to see how this continues to develop, and whether putting slow pressure on the more extremist Turks to change will have any effect. It seems to me to be the kind of thing that if you're going to do it anyway, knowing that some people will disapprove and that you might be prosecuted won't make a big difference.

[Iterate]

8. Re-inventing the wheel

Another point, the EU hasn't as much experience in this as the US, and it's one area where they could learn some things from their western cousins. But they don't, just like the US is loath to learn from them when it comes to issues of religion and fascism.

I ran across this internet radio piece from Deutsche Welle. I found it strangely charming in a way, with nothing here that hasn't been learned in the US the hard way. It gives a good hint at the international direction that the EU is heading, the struggle, and how good people from all sides fall short sometimes.

http://www.dw-world.de/dwelle/cda/popups/mediaplayer/1,,,00.html?audID=220917&artID=1535167&titel=Living+in+Germany&sendHP=&sprache=en

[reorg]

13. the kind of thing where being prosecuted won't make a difference?

Hm, no, I don't buy into that. These murders are sometimes well prepared and planned, not unlike mob hits, actually. Sometimes, as is alleged in this last case, the youngest brother in the family will be offered as the sacrificial lamb to justice -- liable to be sentenced as a juvenile, maximum penalty 10 years for first degree murder. Maybe some families will think twice about saving their face towards tribe and clansmen when it is made explicitly and publicly clear that everyone involved in such conspiracies will have to expect a life sentence?

And not only "some people" should openly disapprove - everyone should and openly state that they do. The "Islamic Federation in Berlin" has put a poster on their website now against forced marriages (don't know if and where else they put it in public).

http://www.islamische-foederation.de/aktuell/Zwangsheirat.pdf

That is a good thing. However, do they openly speak out against ancient concepts of honor? Are they publicly discussing women's rights to leave their husbands? Oops, I won't even begin to ask about abortion ...

No, I guess they don't. But they want to introduce and oversee religious classes in schools (in Berlin and other cities 80% of students are Muslims in some schools).

This is why headmasters are getting a little nervous.

And it is my very humble opinion that such organisations should own up to their responsibilities -- if they want to speak for certain segments of society, then let them be pressed relentlessly as to what they do or could do to avoid bloodshed and violence among their flock.


Okay, and now I'll stop talking to myself :-)

[reorg]

9. living too much like a German

is not really the issue here. This phrase refers to something eight graders said in class, defending the recent killing of a young woman ("It was her own fault", "The whore was acting like a German"--"Die hat doch selber Schuld", "Die Hure lief rum wie eine Deutsche.")--and was spectacularly made public in an open letter by their headmaster. These youths (including one girl) were punished, I believe one of them was expelled from school.

This young woman was certainly not killed for "living too much like a German". The offenses calling for punishment by death, so-called "honor killings" of women, are pretty much clearly defined and we should not cheat ourselves: the concept of such acts being offensive/offenses is not entirely alien to our own "culture(s)". I

Basically, it is sex outside of marriage that contaminates the purity of the female image. Whether before, after, or on the side, even if forced upon you such as in rape and sexual torture--if the woman cannot keep clean she is no longer welcome ...

I don't know if someone keeps count on murders committed by jealous husbands in the Western world, but according to UN figures, "honor" murders occur about 5000 times yearly, worldwide. Mostly in rural regions populated by Kurds and Arabs (Eastern Anatolia, Northern Iraq, Jordan), where the majority of marriages are arranged by parents, and the role of women, being deprived of a sound education, is to serve as willing servants of their husbands and children and as unpaid labor force.

The official Turkey does not approve of this "culture" in any way, with respect to women's rights they are quite modern, and were quicker to adopt e. g. the suffrage of women than some "Western" states. They had an exemption for "honor" murders on the books, or rather for cases where the crime had been "provoced" by the victim, which provided for more lenient sentences (still up to about 25 years in prison, I believe). This exemption has been done away with recently--the change will come into effect right now, actually, in April 2005.

So I would expect that German judges no longer feel obliged to be lenient towards conspiracy to murder, even when fathers and brothers are crying and whining they just HAD to do it in order to save their ugly faces. Public statements to this effect have indeed been made. In Germany, the excemption was not explicit, the judges are bound by a general rule to take cultural motives and customs into account.

The German public -- mostly motivated by stereotypical foreigner bashing rather than serious information, though -- is certainly not in favor of accepting the backward, anti-modern repression of women and would not see this as an acceptable trait of any "culture".

As far as I can see, such traits are also no longer acceptable in our own culture, although remnants certainly exist, and before hurling general insults at "Turks" or "Muslims" we had better take a good look at our very recent history.


From:

EXPLORING THE CONTEXT OF WOMEN’S SEXUALITY IN EASTERN TURKEY
Published in: Reproductive Health Matters, Vol. 6, No. 12 (November 1998): 66 - 75

http://www.wwhr.org/?id=743

Marriage and sexuality

According to Article 88 of the Turkish Civil Code, the minimum age for a civil marriage, which is the only legally valid marriage ceremony in Turkey, is 17 for men and 15 for women. However, the age of majority for all other legal procedures except marriage is 18. Despite this law, 16.3 per cent of women living in the region are married under the age of 15 and in a religious ceremony, although it is against the law to hold a religious ceremony of marriage before a civil ceremony has taken place.

Ninety-seven percent of women who were over 24 years of age, and all of the women who were over 34 years of age were or have been married, indicating that marriage is almost compulsory for women living in the region. The tradition of bride price, the sum given by the man to the wife’s family for the realisation of marriage, is very widespread in the region and plays an important role in the attitude of men, who assume that through this payment they have gained all rights over their wives’ sexuality and fertility. In fact, this tradition can be considered as the sale of women for marriage by their families. Although 78.9 per cent of all married women have indicated that they are against this tradition, 61.2 per cent have indicated that their husbands had to pay bride price for them.

(...) The institutions of polygyny, early and forced/arranged marriages, kidnapping and the exchange of women for marriage are widespread in the region.

(...)

A majority of the women (66.6 per cent) believed that, contrary to the law, they could not divorce their husbands if they committed adultery, even if they would have liked to. (...)

On the other hand, the percentage of women who thought they would be killed by their husbands and/or their families if they committed adultery was very high, 66.6 per cent. This perception was even more common among those who had little or no education, those who had only a religious marriage and those who lived in rural areas.

Most of those who thought that their husbands would do something else other than divorcing or killing them, expected that they would be beaten up very badly by their husbands if they were suspected of an extra-marital affair.

The removal of fornication as a criminal offence in law is very recent, and although there are no provisions explicitly referring to ‘crimes of honor’ in the Turkish Criminal Code, this tradition is still supported in law. An extra-marital affair of a husband or wife is considered to be a ‘provocation’ and the sentence can be reduced by one eighth if such provocation is deemed to have taken place.



If the wife commits adultery

My husband would_____________divorce me___kill me___Other

Education
None/primary incomplete______19.4_________75.3_______5.3
Primary complete_____________39.0_________54.5_______6.5
Secondary +__________________45.3_________46.9_______7.8

Marriage type
Only civil___________________53.3_________26.8______19.9
Both civil and religious_____28.4_________66.1_______5.5
Only religious_______________17.1_________79.4_______3.5

Residence
Urban________________________38.5_________56.5_______5.1
Rural________________________19.2_________74.3_______6.5

Total________________________27.5_________66.6_______5.9

[reorg]

10. more info on the case in question

Hatun Sürücü


From The Los Angeles Times

>> (...)

A lithe woman who wore big earrings and shoulder-length hair, Surucu was the daughter of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants from the Anatolian plains of southeastern Turkey, part of a stream of guest workers who began arriving in the 1960s. She grew up amid the basement mosques and kebab stands in this city's multicultural Kreuzberg district.

Friends say her father, Kerim, a cook, adhered to the strict traditions of his native land. She was 16 when her parents arranged for her to marry her cousin and move to Istanbul, Turkey.

It didn't last. She returned to Germany around 2000 with her son, Can. She distanced herself from her family and complained to police that one of her five brothers had threatened her.

She moved into her own apartment and enrolled in an electrician apprentice program. She went to discos. She drank alcohol. She stopped wearing the hijab. She observed some tenets of her faith, such as not eating pork. Friends say she believed that Europe held a place for modern Muslim women.

(...)

"Respect is the motive behind honor killing. The honor of the family and the honor of the brothers are fixed upon how the sister's perceived," he said. "I don't want to defend these brothers, but they were raised in a system to uphold the honor of the family at any price. Hatun married and left a husband and returned home to live alone.

"What's worse, she didn't want anything to do with her biological family. They couldn't figure this out. She just didn't want to be controlled anymore." ...


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-honor20mar20,1,2344694.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true

[JVS]

11. Es gibt natuerlich Organisationen innerhalb der islamischen Gemeinschaft..

[reorg]

12. except that she would not say

"innerhalb der islamischen Gemeinschaft" - we are not in the habit of imposing the label "community" (Gemeinschaft / Gemeinde) on groups that do not organize themselves as such -- not idiomatic German :-)

The very fact that she mentions "organizations" in the plural term speaks to the fact that there are various Turkish communities, not a monolithic one, covering a wide range from left-wing radical Kurdish women's groups to hardcore fascist extremists, which would require a different translation for the whole lot of them in German, except if one speaks "Denglish", which OTOH may be entirely possible, and is actually very much in fashion.

Maybe she said: Es gibt natürlich Organisationen, die es tunlichst vermeiden, einen Standpunkt einzunehmen, der den Werten und Überzeugungen vieler türkischer Einwanderer hier diametral widerspricht und die im Gegenteil großen Wert darauf legen, sich von als zu westlich-liberal verstandenen Positionen deutlich abzugrenzen ...


Number of organisations in Germany

claiming the head scarf is required by the Quran and calling for non-discrimination by the state, that is they want teachers, school children, state employees be allowed to wear it whenever they wish.

1. Ahl-al-Bayt Alevitische Religionsgemeinschaft e.V.
2. A.K.E.V. e.V.
3. Bund Moslemischer Pfadfinder Deutschlands e.V.
4. Bundesverband für Islamische Tätigkeiten e.V.
5. Bündnis der islamischen Gemeinden in Norddeutschland e.V.
6. Dachverband der Türkisch-Islamischen Vereine in Deutschland e.V.
7. Der islamische Bund in Hamburg e.V.
8. Deutsch-Afrikanische Transfer-Agency e.V.
9. Deutsche Muslim-Liga e.V. (DML)
10. Deutsche Muslim-Liga Bonn e.V. (DML Bonn)
11. Deutsch-Somalischer Verein e.V.
12. Ehsan Hilfsorganisation e.V.
13. EuroNur – Jamaat’un Nur Europa
14. Gemeinschaft der Ahl-al-Bayt Vereine in Deutschland e.V.
15. Gesamtverband der türkischen Gemeinden und Vereine in Düsseldorf e.V.
16. Haus des Islam e.V. (HDI)
17. IGMG-Jugendverband
18. Islam - Info e.V.
19. Islamisch – Pädagogisches Institut e.V.
20. Islamische Akademie Deutschland e.V.
21. Islamische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sozial- und Erziehungsberufe e.V. (IASE)
22. Islamische Föderation Bremen e.V.
23. Islamische Föderation Hessen e.V.
24. Islamische Föderation in Baden-Württemberg e.V.
25. Islamische Föderation in Bayern e.V.
26. Islamische Föderation in Berlin e.V.
27. Islamische Föderation Niedersachsen e.V.
28. Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland e.V. (IGD)
29. Islamische Gemeinschaft in Hamburg e.V. (IGH)
30. Islamische Gemeinschaft Jama’at un-Nur in Deutschland e.V.
31. Islamische Gemeinschaft Milli Görüs e.V. (IGMG)
32. Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft Baden-Württemberg e.V.
33. Islamische Religionsgemeinschaft Bayern e.V.
34. Islamische Religionsgemeinschaft Hessen e.V. (IRH)
35. Islamische Religionsgemeinschaft Schleswig-Holstein e.V.
36. Islamischer Frauenverband für Bildung und Erziehung in Deutschland e.V. (IFBED)
37. Islamischer Rat der Ahlulbayt Gemeinschaften in Deutschland e.V. (IRAB)
38. Islamisches Informations- Kulturzentrum e.V.
39. Islamisches Zentrum Aachen e.V. (IZA)
40. Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg e.V. (IZH)
41. Islamisches Zentrum München e.V. (IZM)
42. Islamologisches Institut in Deutschland e.V.
43. Islamrat für Bayern e.V.
44. Islamrat für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland e.V.
45. Islamrat für Rheinland-Pfalz e.V.
46. Moslemisches Sozialwerk in Europa e.V.
47. Muslimische Studentenvereinigung in Deutschland e.V. (MSV)
48. Muslimischer Frauenverein Frauen Ahlulbayt Deutschland e.V. (FADAK)
49. Muslimischer Sozialbund e.V.
50. Ostturkestanischer (Uigurischer) Nationalkongress e.V.
51. Schura Hamburg – Rat der islamischen Gemeinschaften in Hamburg e.V.
52. Schura Niedersachsen – Landesverband der Muslime in Niedersachsen e.V.
53. Union der in Europäischen Ländern Arbeitenden Muslime e.V. (UELAM)
54. Union der Islamisch Albanischen Zentren in Deutschland e.V. (UIAZD)
55. Union der Türkisch – Islamischen Kulturvereine in Europa e.V. (ATIB)
56. Union Marokkanischer Imame
57. Union Muslimischer Studenten Organisation in Europa e.V. (UMSO)
58. Verband der Islamischen Kulturzentren in Deutschland e.V. (VIKZ)
59. Verband Islamischer Jugendzentren e.V.
60. Verein für neue Deutsche Muslime – Haqqani Trust e.V.
61. Vereinigung Islamischer Gemeinden der Bosniaken in Deutschland e.V. (VIGB)
62. Weimar Institut e.V.
63. Zentralrat der Muslime in Baden-Württemberg e.V.
64. Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland e.V. (ZMD)