English translation: generation of eternal interns / génération précaire
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GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW)
German term or phrase:
Generation Praktikum
English translation:
generation of eternal interns / génération précaire
German to English translations [PRO] Social Sciences - Human Resources
German term or phrase:Generation Praktikum
Any ideas how I can translate this in-phrase - coined only last year by a journalist from "Die Zeit" and now to be heard all over the place in Germany.
Context is a speech to an international audience about personnel management in the public service.
"Gehören diese [Menschen] nicht eher zu einer Generation Praktikum?"
Otherwise, perhaps something with "vicious circle" (as suggested at top)
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 18 hrs (2006-10-16 08:48:27 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
... force loads of youngsters with University degrees into perpetual internship contracts for years (see these recent German articles on the topic Späte Rache nicht ausgeschlossen and Generation Praktikum). http://seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/discuss/msgReader$1537
(and no, the German reference was by chance, i.e. I didn't Google for it!)
In the final version of the speech I didn't use the "eternal interns" wordplay, but I did re-phrase. I think "the intern generation" might catch on in English, but it doesn't seem to have become established yet. 4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer
What the speaker basically means is a generation of young people who go from one Praktikum to the next, i.e. are exploited by employers who never actually take them on? Perhaps something like a "vicious circle" of internships / non-paid apprenticeships?
The UK universities that send us student *interns* every year have no problems with the term, neither do the UK students themselves. I think "intern" is now understood internationally. You can certainly lose track of the vernacular. I don't.
and to adopt international usage – nothing wrong with that, of course. ‘Internship’ is simply not understood by a general readership (‘real’ or ‘unreal’) in the UK. (And yes, sometimes we have more tolerance for Gallicisms than Americanisms!)
An interesting though spurious distinction has been introduced between the ‘real world’ and some other unspecified ‘world’. When one leaves the UK to live and work in a foreign country, it is possible to lose track of the vernacular
I really don't think there's a GB/US issue here, not in the real (non-translator) world, at least. The term "internship" is also widely used in the UK for what are also known there as "work placements". An "apprenticeship" is *not* a Praktikum, anywhere!
To avoid the GB/US "intern" issue, what do you think of taking the corresponding term from France "génération précaire", since the use of French terms seems to be more accepted than that of German, and Google give sa few uses of the French term in English documents.
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Answers
11 mins confidence: peer agreement (net): -1
generation apprenticeship
Explanation: The "Generation Praktikum" (describing the phenomenon that most people leaving university are starting their professional careers as interns - without long-term contracts but with low salaries) is all over the German papers (this week also on the cover of SPIEGEL's hard copy version). I also remember Thomas Knüwer's blog, which some days ago had a nice little story on how interns are being (ab-)used in PR agencies. http://andreswittermann.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/08/index.ht...
And things aren’t looking much
better for our university-educated
young professionals. In Germany,
there is a new buzzword making the
rounds: “Generation Praktikum,”
or in English “generation apprenticeship”.
And indeed, there is now an entire generation
of highly skilled, flexible, and mobile young people that
are forced to move from one (mostly unpaid) internship
to another, sometimes for years. Instead of welcoming
these young professionals with open arms, as most
well-functioning economies would do, our much-heralded
labour market, which prides itself on “inclusion” and
“protection”, is creating nothing but fear and insecurity
among the very people we need the most to sustain our
future prosperity. www.lisboncouncil.net/force-download.php?file=/media/commen...
Kim Metzger Mexico Local time: 15:53 Specializes in field Native speaker of: English PRO pts in category: 411
The translation workplace 
peer agreement (net): -1
