Tuesday, September 08, 2009

German Spelling Bee Nightmare

I received an email at work today with the following German word in it:

Dienstreisegenehmigungssystems

Yep, that's 30 letters long.  Can you imagine getting this one during a spelling bee? 

If you are not up on your German, it means Travel Authorization System.  Why it needs to be all one word, I don't know.  The Germans are really into that and to make it worse, most online translators can't handle these complex words.  The only way to translate it is to know enough German to be able to pull out the individual words and look them up. 

Sigh.  This is part of the reason I am far from fluent after 2 years of lessons.

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