Linguistic nuances, Part II

You may have noticed that many Germans, when speaking English, use the word "when" instead of "if". That's because in German there is one word that usually does the job of both: the word "wenn". Context and sentence structure / verb tense usually tells you which conditional it's meant to be.

But what confuses me is how many Dutch people I hear saying things like, "When you have children, please drop them off at the crèche." They obviously mean "IF you have children...". A natural enough mistake for a German speaker to make, but a Dutch speaker? In Dutch you have "als" ("if") and "wanneer" ("when").

Or that's what I, as an outsider, observe. But it must be more complex. A confusion like that can't arise if these words really were one-to-one translations, so there must be cases in which "wanneer" would translate as "if". These are exactly the sorts of things that you would know if you spoke a language fluently.

Got that? Let's try something:

English: "WHEN you come home"
German: "WENN Du nach Hause kommst"
Dutch: "WANNEER je naar huis komt"

English: "IF you come home"
German: "WENN Du nach Hause kommst"
Dutch: "ALS je naar huis komt."

[just for confusion, let me throw this one in as well, because it's an example of ENGLISH using the same word to mean something different entirely:

English: "WHEN we were young"
German: "ALS wir jung waren"
Dutch: "TOEN wij jong waren"
]

Now to make it interesting: the German language does have resources to convey the shades of difference. You can say "FALLS Du nach Hause kommst", which really means "if you come home". So why do Germans use "WENN" so much when the language has a perfectly good conditional that conveys uncertainty? I don't know why. We just do. And one of the meanings of "fluency" is that you have an instinct for these things even when (if, hehehe...) you can't explain them.

One thing you have to do all the time in translation work is change a sentence to another sentence that means practically the same thing. In many situations there is not much difference between "when you come home" and "if you come home", but if (when?) I'm dealing with a situation in which it's definitely "when" and not "if", I could just change the sentence to "once you're home", which means practically the same thing as "when you come home" and can be translated clearly enough into German.

I navigate these waters with little effort since I'm fluent in both, but these are exactly the sorts of little things you see non-native speakers tripped up by: they know how to use the words, but not to the degree of conveying the exact shade of meaning they intend. And even if you're fluent in two languages, it still doesn't necessarily make you a good translator.

In Dutch, though I have a solid grasp of the language, I lack the fine tuning of these nuances to understand why someone will occasionally say "wanneer" where I would have thought "als" was the correct word. There isn't a one-to-one correlation to the English words "when" and "if", and my mind has not yet created categories for conditionals to be divided by other criteria.