Read The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe in German

Literal but understandable

This translation follows our main principle of Interlinear translation: translating words literally and individually as long as such translation is still comprehensible. This has lead to phrasing such as:

The more usual English way of translating the phrase would be more akin to "But our mood is not in our power" or "But we cannot control our mood". However, this translation, albeit somewhat unusual in English, is still perfectly understandable. Thus we translated this phrase literally and word-by-word. However, the following would make less sense if literal:

This would be a bit harder to understand, would it not? And hence we translate such phrases idiomatically:

Embracing cognates

Just like in our other Interlinear translations of closely related languages, we try to use cognates between German and English whenever it was possible to do so.

For example, we translated Flucht as flight (and not running away), hinderte as hindered (and not prevented), selten as seldom (and not rarely), wanderung as wander (and not hike), etc.

We did this with the knowledge that there are also false cognates or simply situations where the meanings of words in German and English have diverged too much to be useful. In those cases, we did not use cognates.

We believe that such special attention to cognates can help German learners draw analogies between German and English more readily and remember German words faster.

Accompanied by audio

We add a free native speaker recorder German audiobook to all purchases of this e-book. The audiobook comes as a collection of mp3 audio files, which can be downloaded and played on your computer, phone or other device.