Kon­traste der Heimat, orig­i­nally uploaded by Thorsten Becker.

Lan­guage is much more than the ver­bal expres­sion of one’s thoughts: Our lan­guage is an inte­gral part of our iden­tity and cul­tural her­itage. We not only speak a lan­guage, we think and live in and with a lan­guage. And despite our tech­no­log­i­cal and eco­nom­i­cal advances there are con­cepts we may not fully grasp in other cul­tures because we don’t — lit­er­ally — think like them. Their words and expres­sions don’t have the same mean­ing in our lan­guage. For exam­ple the Ger­man word “Heimat”. While it is often trans­lated as “home” or “home­land” nei­ther word expresses the mean­ing and the con­cept of Heimat. To under­stand this sim­ple word a rather lengthy expla­na­tion would be needed of our Ger­man cul­tural her­itage, our pas­sion for our coun­try, the emo­tions felt when being away from our Heimat and the feel­ings emerg­ing when being in our Heimat. One word can mean so much yet can not be fully grasp by some­one with a dif­fer­ent cul­tural her­itage sim­ply through trans­la­tion. I have been work­ing as a trans­la­tor on sev­eral occa­sions and I have fre­quently come across expres­sions on either side (Ger­man and Eng­lish) that have no equiv­a­lent in the other lan­guage as