FAQ
overflow

QUESTION

Recently, I found a citation in a signature of someone on codeproject:

As programmers go, I'm fairly social. Which still means I'm a borderline sociopath by normal standards.

I would translate this into the following:

Für Programmiererverhältnisse bin ich recht sozial. Was noch immer bedeutet, dass ich ein Borderline-Soziopath bin unter normalen Standards/Gesichtspunkten.

Especially the first part (As programmers go) keeps me thinking. If I translate this more word-by-word, this results in "Wenn Programmierer gehen..." but I would never translate this German back into the cited English "As programmers go". So probably I'm totally wrong. What is the translation of this citation in German?

ANSWER

You are right in that "wenn Programmierer gehen" is not a proper translation of that phrase. Your proposed translation is actually ok. However because the word "Programmiererverhältnisse" is quite clunky I'd use the following way:

Für einen Programmierer bin ich recht sozial.

The word "borderline" does exist in German but I only know it from the borderline syndrome which is probably not what is meant here. I'd rather say

Was bedeutet, dass ich für normale Verhältnisse immer noch an der Grenze zum Soziopathen bin.

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