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  • Is “to think along with” a good translation for “meedenken”?

    Is “to think along with” a good translation for “meedenken”?

    What is “meedenken”?

    The Netherlands is famously a culture of teamwork and compromise, and as such the word “meedenken” is one that is often used. When one person asks another “kun je even met me meedenken?” (literally: Can you ‘think with me’ for a moment?), what they want to do is explain a problem they are having to the other person, and then brainstorm possible solutions together.

    Translating “meedenken”

    In recent years, I have noticed that translators (both human and AI) are choosing to translate the word “meedenken” as “to think along with”. So the question above would be translated as “Can you think along with me for a moment?”.

    I grew up speaking both Dutch and English, and sometimes that leads to problems as a translator, because English phrases and Dutch phrases get mixed up in my brain. When it comes to “think along with” I was unsure of two things: is it actually a phrase that people would understand, or would it just confuse them? And if yes, does it actually mean the same thing as “meedenken”?

    There are two schools of thought when it comes to questions like this. One school of thought (prescriptive, for the linguists among us) says that you should look it up in a dictionary or ask a specialist. The other one (descriptive) says you should find out how real people speak and understand this phrase. I am firmly in the second camp. So I put out a survey on Reddit.

    Results

    I got 584 responses from people who were older than 21, and did not speak Dutch or German (leaving those in would have contaminated the results).

    First, I asked:

    Here are the responses:

    So there is quite a big group (62.4%) who are of the opinion that the phrase “is not good English”.

    Then I asked:

    Here are the responses to that one:

    When a Dutch person uses the phrase “please think along with me”, they are asking their conversation partner to brainstorm on a problem with them. These results suggest that that is not how they would be understood.

    (The 5 people who replied “other” all said that they thought it was a combination of the two most popular answers. )

    Some extra remarks people made

    In my survey I gave people a chance to add remarks at the end if they had any. Here are some remarks people had about “to think along with”:

    When I hear “think along with me”, it sounds like something an elementary school teacher (of ages 5-7) might say to their students, not something that adults would use with each other.

    I would use “put our heads together,” a common phrase for that. Doing anything “along with” someone implies that they’re the expert and you’re keeping up, like “cooking along with” might mean watching a video while you try to make the same dish.

    The “along with me” construction in English implies that the speaker is leading and the other person is being invited to follow; I would not expect a collaboration.

    Conclusion: “to think along with” is not a good translation for “meedenken”

    The term “meedenken” is used very often in Dutch to mean brainstorming a solution to a problem together. Many people translate this with “to think along with”, but when a Dutch person asks “Could you think along with me?” they are very likely to be misunderstood, as the majority of non-Dutch people over the age of 21 feel that this would mean that the Dutch person wants them to follow their train of thought, to listen to them while they explain their reasoning.

    Is this a huge breakdown in communication? Probably not, the meanings are very similar, and when two people are talking together and one of them uses this phrase, it will probably sort itself out.

    When a Dutch person is speaking, they would do well to say something like “Do you have a minute to brainstorm solutions for this problem I am having?” or “Can I pick your brain for a second?”

    More importantly, when a translator (such as myself) is translating a Dutch text into English, “meedenken” should NOT be translated as “to think along with”.

    So how SHOULD I translate “meedenken”?

    I talk about that at length on my Dutch site hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl, where I try to find good translations for difficult-to-translate words. I’m not 100% happy with any of my translations for “meedenken”.

    Ideas that I have come up with include “to bounce ideas off a person”, “to brainstorm solutions”, “to put your heads together”. You can read them all here.

    Dutch companies love saying “we denken graag met u mee!” which I find especially tricky. Do you have any good ideas for a translation? Let me know in the comments!

    Stuff I should have done better

    A number of people disapproved of the fact that I asked people if something was “good English” or not. They felt I should have written something like “it is not natural-sounding English”. The reason I asked the question the way I did was because 1) I wanted to keep things simple and 2) I am interested in how Dutch people would be perceived if they were interacting with English speakers. I felt the perception of “is it good English” was more important than “is it natural English”. But it’s all open to debate 😉

    There were 4 people who noted that I had written down the answer options incorrectly, and their answer would have been “I want you to follow my train of thought, to listen to me while I explain my reasoning”. They were, of course, completely correct – my answer options did not fit my question properly. Luckily it appears most people weren’t phased by my own bad English.

    Choosing which responses to include

    I got a whopping 1990 (!!) responses. (This is the power of Reddit. I highly recommend it to any university student trying to get responses for their thesis.)

    To my regret, I had to take away 830 responses for this particular question, because I had made an important omission in my answer options, and the responses via Reddit were so fast that by the time I had noticed and rectified it, all those people had already started filling in the survey. (Lesson learned: always do a pilot survey with just a few participants, so you can pick up on omissions!)

    Of those left, I had to remove 126 people who had not filled in the whole survey. I also took away everybody under the age of 21 (a whopping 375 people; see here the downside of doing research via Reddit), because I wanted the answers to reflect the kinds of people that might potentially do business with Dutch people. Then I took away everybody who spoke Dutch, German or Afrikaans (71 people), because I wanted to know what people thought who had never heard the term “meedenken” (or the very similar German “mitdenken”).

  • John Oliver does a Dutch accent (and we learn “Basilius” sounds like a typical Dutch name)

    John Oliver does a Dutch accent (and we learn “Basilius” sounds like a typical Dutch name)

    I wasn’t quite ready to start publishing on this website, but then I saw John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode on carbon offsets, and I thought: “well, there’s my first post.”

    In the episode, Oliver ponders the term “ten dollars to offset your pig”. An then comes this bit:

    “Ten dollars to offset your pig” sounds like a Dutch sex act that was sent back and forth through Google Translate one too many times.

    He then puts on a strong, fake Dutch accent to impersonate what I assume is meant to be a Dutch pimp, and says:

    “For ten dollars, Basilius, he offset your pig. So good, so strong, your eyes will pop, and your brave testicles will switch (twitch?). So are we doing this? Basilius! Offset that pig!”

    Find the clip at the 7 minutes 47 seconds mark:

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    John Oliver is a hero

    Okay, first off, John Oliver is amazing, and I’d totally marry him if I weren’t happy with my partner, and he weren’t happily married, and we would meet somehow on an airplane or something, and he’d be romantically interested in me, for the long term, not just a fling. By making serious issues funny, he is educating the world and probably having more positive effects on it than 1000 policy makers.

    That having been said, let’s talk about the Dutchness:

    Where he got the Dutchness right

    Saying “he offset your pig” instead of “he will offset your pig” – this is an absolutely correct example of grammar from Dutch English speakers. When I’m proofreading English texts written by Dutch people, I sometimes feel adding “will” to future actions is, like, 80% of what I do.

    Put in present tense, there should of course have been an “s” after “offset”; “he offsets your pig”. Most Dutch people wouldn’t do this wrong anymore, because it is drilled into them so thoroughly at school, but it is certainly a mistake that is made.

    Saying “dis” instead of “this” – yep, that’s what they do. It’s something I plan to write about more in future, but I actually think using a “d” sound for the voiced “th” (like in “this”, “that” and “though”) is quite a charming part of the Dutch accent.

    Saying “so strong” – Dutch people overuse the word “strong”, not because its literal translation “sterk” is such a much-used word in Dutch, but because they don’t know how to translate words like “krachtig”, “heftig”, “hevig”, “flink”, “fors”. They know “strong” isn’t the right word, but it’s the best one they can find in their mental English lexicon, and they know the listener will interpret it the right way, so they use it.

    Where he got the Dutchness – kinda right?

    Pronouncing “s” like “sh” – Okay, so this is a little bit true, but far too overdone.

    The Dutch “s” is more forceful than the English one – the Dutch keep their tongue flatter than the English when making an “s”, meaning the air is pressed past more of the tongue. To Dutch people, this doesn’t sound like a “sh” at all, but to English people, who make the “s” with the tip of their tongue only, anything that uses more tongue than that sounds like a “sh”. When they copy a Dutch accent, that is often the feature that they choose.

    It is my personal observation that Dutch people of a younger generation are far better at pronouncing the “s” in a more native English way, and it is the older Dutch that have that “sh”- way of speaking. And even for that older generation, I don’t think it is a fair portrayal of their accent to make the “sh” as pronounced as Oliver is doing. But he’s doing it for laughs, he needs a quick and dirty way to make it clear he is pretending to be Dutch, and the sh-thing is, for English speakers, a quick marker for the Dutch. So I get it.

    This video from a Dutch comedian with a knack for accents goes over five ways to “do a Dutch accent” and you will notice the “s”- “sh” thing is not one of them. It just goes to prove my point that this marker is something from the past.

    Something that sounds like a weird sex act gets connected to the Dutch – Oh well. I prefer this prejudice to anything to do with weed and drugs. Being open-minded about sex and allowing people to communicate freely about this topic means this little country has reduced a lot of problems that other countries still face.

    Where he got the Dutchness wrong

    Calling the prostitute “Basilius” – I have NO IDEA where this comes from, and if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment! I can only think it’s a contraction of “Basil” (not a Dutch name in the slightest) and “Cornelius” (a very outdated Dutch name). I guess they wanted a Dutch-sounding name with two “s”-es so they could use it for the “sh”-joke, and “Basilius” sounds Dutch to Americans???

    “Your brave testicles” – Dutch people do misuse the word “brave”, thinking it means “obedient”, but they would not use it in this sentence.

    “Dollars” – obviously, if you travel to the red-light district in Amsterdam hoping to offset your pig, you will be paying in Euros, not dollars.

    Heddwen Newton teaches English and Dutch, and is also a translator and a linguist. Her newsletter
    English and the Dutch is about all the funny and interesting ways Dutch and English overlap.