Time and again, I keep hearing the Austrian Minister of Finance say that “am Ende des Tages” the taxpayer will have to pay the bill for all those nice presents that all political parties like to announce these days. While I appreciate that he seems to be the only Austrian politician to acknowledge this fact, apparently he has fallen in love with a anglicism whose entry into the German language is quite recent, I believe, but that is about to become as wide-spread as the omnipresent “Das macht keinen Sinn” (instead of the idiomatically correct “Das hat/ergibt keinen Sinn” or “Das ist nicht sinnvoll”) or the annoying “Er hat einen guten Job gemacht” (instead of the correct “Er hat seine Sache gut gemacht”).
Until two or three years ago, “am Ende des Tages” meant one thing in German: at the end of the day as in “in the evening”, not in the sense of “as the ultimate outcome of something”. Even with the former meaning, it sounded a bit weird. The German equivalent of the idiomatic use of “at the end of the day” is “letzten Endes”, “im Endeffekt” or “letztendlich”; no need to borrow from English.
Appears as though French has also been influenced by this English expression, at least in Canada:
Even in Italian, I have come across “alla fine della giornata” instead of “in ultima analisi” or “alla fine dei conti”.L’emploi de l’expression à la fin de la journée pour signifier « au bout du compte, en fin de compte, en somme, finalement » est un calque de l’anglais at the end of the day. En effet, ce sens figuré n’existe pas en français.
I am not a purist, and I think that influences from other languages are truly enriching when they help us express something more concisely or more precisely. But since all of these languages already had a couple of perfectly simple and concise idioms to convey the meaning of “at the end of the day”, I'd really like to know what's so great about this expression.
Categories: Language and Translation
Keywords/tags: anglicism German Italian French am Ende des Tages translation language
Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Trackbacks
Trackback URL for this entry:
http://christianflury.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/17
