Why Dutch to English is harder than it looks
Dutch looks close enough to English to be dangerous. Brave means well-behaved, eventueel means possibly, and solliciteren means to apply for a job. The resemblance is exactly what makes these slip past unnoticed, because the sentence still reads fine in English while meaning something else.
Dutch compounds nouns like German does. Ziektekostenverzekering is health insurance and gezelligheid has no English word at all. The first needs unpacking into a phrase; the second needs a sentence, or an accepted loss.
Separable verbs split across the sentence. Ik bel je morgen op keeps op at the end, attached in meaning to bel at the start. A translator reading left to right sees the wrong verb until the last word arrives, which is why the whole sentence has to be parsed before the English begins.
Dutch directness reads as blunt in English. A Dutch message says what it wants without the layer of softening English expects, so a perfectly polite Dutch request can arrive in English sounding like a demand. Setting a friendly tone adds the padding back where English keeps it.
Written by Hardik Vegad, Co-founder, Translatify. Last updated .
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