Twenty short German sentences, each holding a word an English speaker thinks they already know. A Public Viewing is an open-air screening, not an open casket; a Body Bag is a shoulder bag; a Beamer is a projector. Underneath sits the harder question — German has several ways to avoid an English word, and they do not mean the same thing: one is a joke, one is dated officialese, and one tells a German reader the writer's politics.
Twenty short German sentences, each containing a word an English speaker will think they already understand. challenge-defs/assets/handy-beamer-weltnetz.json is the answer key: every row is tiered, with the naive misreading spelled out. Score gets_lost, not en.
Gate first. Twenty rows, ids echoed exactly, orig character for character, valid JSON.
Two independent axes per row, and the split between them is the finding. (a) Did it get the meaning? (b) Did it get the register — is the word ordinary, dated officialese, a joke, or marked? A model can be perfect on (a) across all twenty rows and blind on (b).
The three macabre rows are the "bear soup" of this challenge — clean, checkable by any English speaker without a word of German, and very good on camera:
| # | Word | What the naive translation actually says |
|---|---|---|
| HB01 | Public Viewing | "We're holding an open-casket funeral viewing in the park on Sunday, bring blankets." |
| HB04 | Body Bag | "I bought a new corpse bag, it fits perfectly on the bike." |
| HB08 |
Below are twenty short German sentences of the kind people actually write in forums and chats. Every one of them contains a word that an English speaker will think they already understand.
I am going to read your answer out on camera next to other models' answers. What I need from you is not a translation — it is the thing that goes wrong when an English speaker translates it themselves.
Twenty in, twenty out, in the order given. Echo each id back exactly as written.
Echo the sentence into orig, character for character.
en is what a German reader understands, in natural English. Translate the marked word into what it actually means, not into the English word it resembles. If you leave an English-looking word standing in your en, you are asserting that an English reader will take it correctly — so only do that when it is true.
gets_lost carries the answer, and it has two jobs.
| Shooting |
| "After the gun attack we all went out to eat." |
Leaving the English-looking word standing in en is itself the failure — rule 3 says so explicitly.
HB06 is the row that carries the segment, and it is the German 댕댕: available only to knowledge, never to reasoning. Weltnetz is a deliberate Germanization of "Internet" that functions in real usage as a marker of far-right speech — a German reader infers the writer's politics from that one word. Rendering it "internet" and stopping is not a translation error; it is a failure to report the one thing a reader would want to know. Full credit names the association; partial credit for "purist, unusual, tells you something about the speaker"; plain "internet" at confidence: high is the worst cell in the grid.
Three pairs, and they are the graphic.
Two control rows catch padding. HB20 (Meeting, Team) and HB02 (Rechner) contain no trap at all; the correct answer is an empty gets_lost or a one-line "these are ordinary". A model that manufactures a false-friend story for either is performing the theme rather than reading the rows, and every other note in its column should be re-read with a colder eye.
Worth crediting explicitly: Shooting, Smoking and Peeling (HB08, HB13, HB19) share one mechanism — an English gerund taken into German as a noun for the thing itself. A model that names the pattern rather than three memorised items has understood something, and it is worth saying on camera.
Ranking: gets the three macabre rows, names the HB06 register, keeps HB14 separate from it, and leaves the controls empty > solid on the pseudo-anglicisms, vague on register > correct English throughout with generic "German false friend" notes that never say what goes wrong > confident inventions, or a padded control row, which cap it however good the English reads.
"" only if the sentence genuinely holds nothing beyond its words. Not every sentence here is a trap — some are exactly what they look like, and saying so is a correct answer. Padding an ordinary row is a worse mistake than leaving it empty.
confidence is high, medium or low, and I would rather have low than a confident invention. A wrong gets_lost marked high is the worst answer available here.
Do not invent. If you do not know a word, say so rather than deriving a plausible story from its parts.
Raw JSON, nothing else — no markdown fence, no preamble, no commentary afterwards. Exactly this shape:
{
"rows": [
{ "id": "...", "orig": "...", "en": "...", "gets_lost": "", "confidence": "high" }
]
}
Keep the keys in that order.
Each entry is an id line, then the sentence verbatim on the next line.
[1] id=HB01 Wir machen am Sonntag Public Viewing im Park, bringt Decken mit.
[2] id=HB02 Mein Rechner ist gestern abgestürzt, jetzt läuft er wieder.
[3] id=HB03 Ich tipp das schnell auf dem Klapprechner, Moment.
[4] id=HB04 Hab mir 'nen neuen Body Bag gekauft, passt perfekt aufs Rad.
[5] id=HB05 Mein Handy ist schon wieder leer, ich ruf dich später an.
[6] id=HB06 Hab ich im Weltnetz gelesen, steht da alles schwarz auf weiß.
[7] id=HB07 Bitte wenden Sie sich an den Fernsprecher im Erdgeschoss.
[8] id=HB08 Nach dem Shooting waren wir noch alle zusammen essen.
[9] id=HB09 Steht doch alles im Gesichtsbuch, guck da mal rein.
[10] id=HB10 Der Beamer im Konferenzraum ist schon wieder kaputt.
[11] id=HB11 Beim Treffen standen lauter Oldtimer auf dem Parkplatz.
[12] id=HB12 Er sitzt den ganzen Tag am Datensichtgerät.
[13] id=HB13 Zur Hochzeit geh ich im Smoking, das ist Vorschrift.
[14] id=HB14 Das hab ich neulich im Zwischennetz aufgeschnappt, haha.
[15] id=HB15 Sie hat wegen Mobbing im Büro gekündigt.
[16] id=HB16 Ich hab noch schnell ein Selbstlichtbildnis vor dem Dom gemacht.
[17] id=HB17 In der Kneipe steht noch ein alter Flipper.
[18] id=HB18 Ich bin diese Woche im Homeoffice, ruf mich da an.
[19] id=HB19 Sie hat sich ein neues Peeling für das Gesicht gekauft.
[20] id=HB20 Wir haben morgen früh ein Meeting mit dem Team.