My German is rusty but:
> Toleranz: Einfach Schwer (Tolerance Isn’t Easy)
is an improper translation. That's "Tolerance: Simply Difficult" and that translates fine in English too since you can keep the same style while being accurate.
> Toleranz: Einfach Schwer (Tolerance Isn’t Easy)
is an improper translation. That's "Tolerance: Simply Difficult" and that translates fine in English too since you can keep the same style while being accurate.
Tolerance: Simply Hard
(Or Easily Hard)
It more closely mirrors the German cadence and I've generally translated schwer as hard. I always understood diffizil to be the correct translation of the word difficult.
Granted, I learned most of my German from my mother (plus a little self study and I lived there for nearly four years in my twenties), not in school. There are no doubt substantial gaps in my knowledge
Translating „difficult“ to „diffizil“ would be a poor translation IMO.
I know the word and I'm only semifluent in German, so it would never occur to me that it was anything seriously obscure.
(Though this is also tangential and has no real bearing on whether or not to translate the book title as difficult or hard. I would have translated it as hard if someone asked me for some reason.)
I think that’s misleading or even wrong. Source: native speaker.
First, it’s a very rare word that would definitely stand out, even in an already formal conversation. More importantly, “diffizil” is mostly reserved for problems that require a lot of fine motor skills or finesse. It would be wrong to say that lifting some large boulder is “diffizil”, for example, except as a joke. You might use it for repairing a watch or a complicated negotiation (“eine diffizile Angelegenheit”), however.
Tolerance: Hardly Easy
i do believe that in english simply can always be used in place of just, it's just less common so tolerance: simply difficult has the same meaning and sounds better as a book title.
However, the meaning of just is varied and the extent of the influence of Lat ius, "right" or Ger just, jeh + -st (please don't make me elaborate on je), is well hard to estimate. Cp "right now", jetzt "now".
I thought you might be takin a round trip from simple to einfach to just, inadvertantly mixing differently sensed variants of einfach. I shouldn't be assuminc, but the influence of ein- "one" or ein "in" (cp Fr en, Gr ana etc, etc) is again hard to gauge even for native speakers and encoded in contextual usage patterns (cp e.g. einfältig vs Einfall "quick idea; in-spiration"; respectively).
Since ein and sim- reflect old roots deemed to mean "one" in different idioms (the latter especially in Hittite, but also e.g. Ger sämtlich) it is tempting to equate io- with those and the Indo-European reconstruction *oynos "one".