@LuckieNoob thanks.
It would be very interesting if AI could do this job for an entire book, instead of “simplify with AI”, something like “modernise with AI”. Transforming an old book with modern language, that wouldn’t be so bad.
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A book like this is a piece of history though. Part of the enjoyment of reading such books is in the idiosyncrasies of the language the people of that time use.
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I don’t know. I may try converting Shakespeare to 1970’s German street slang =)
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It’s true, but I usually try to avoid old original books for different reasons, and I believe we should read them only if we are already quite advanced with the language. However, this is an exception for me because I’m very connected to it.
ha ha ha. He would be proud of you. 
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Great idea, Eric (inspired by Jules White’s Coursera course on “trustworthy genAI”):
"Here are two famous paragraphs from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, in Middle English:
“To be, or nat to be, that is the questioun:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mynde to suffre
The slynges and arowes of outragious fortune,
Or to take armes ageynst a see of troubles
And by opposyng enden hem? To dye, to slepe,
No more; and by a slepe to seye we end
The hert-ake and the thousand natural shockes
That flessh is heyr to, 'tis a consummacioun
Devoutly to be wysshed.”
Here’s ChatGPT’s (v3.5) creative translation inspired by Christiane’s book:
I can certainly try to incorporate some elements of German street talk from the late 1970s, inspired by the context of “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.” Keep in mind that the translation might not perfectly capture the specific tone of that time and place, but I’ll do my best to give it a streetwise feel:
“Sein, oder nicht sein, das ist die Frage, Alder:
Ist’s nobler in der Birne zu ertragen
Die fiesen Dinger und Pfeile der krassen Schicksalsmacht,
Oder sich zu bewaffnen gegen 'nen Haufen Ärger
Und durch Widerstand ihnen ein Ende zu setzen? Sterben, pennen,
Nichts mehr; und durch den Schlaf beenden wir
Das Herzweh und die tausend natürlichen Schläge,
Die das Fleisch erbt, 'ne vollendete Sache,
Voll Ergebenheit zu wünschen.”
Please note that this is a creative attempt to blend Shakespearean English, modern German, and elements of the street talk from that era. If you have specific phrases or expressions from “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” you’d like me to incorporate, feel free to let me know!
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@PeterBormann,
Excellent =). I decided to go one step further and ask ChatGPT to incorporate the 3 words/phrases that David questioned about above. I wasn’t sure what your exact prompt was but tried best based on what you described above:
I’m going to provide a section of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I’d like you to convert it to 1970’s German street talk inspired by the book “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”. I would like you to incorporate the following German slang words and phrases “sich einen Druck zusammenzuschlauchen”, “Fixer” (addict), and “H” (Heroine). Here is the Shakespeare text: (the text your provided)
ChatGPT (4.0) response:
Taking inspiration from the gritty, urban backdrop of 1970s Berlin as depicted in “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo,” and incorporating the requested German slang, here’s how one might reimagine Hamlet’s soliloquy in the context of that era’s street talk:
Zu sein oder nicht zu sein, das ist hier die Frage:
Ob’s edler im Kopf ist, die Drucks und Pfeile von einem miesen Schicksal zu ertragen,
Oder die Arme gegen ein Meer von Stress zu erheben
Und durch Widerstand den ganzen Mist zu beenden? Zu sterben, zu pennen,
Nichts weiter; und durch ein Pennen zu sagen, wir beenden
Den Herzschmerz und die tausend natürlichen Schocks
Den unser Fleisch erbt, das ist ein Ende,
Das man sich echt wünscht.
Sich mit H und den Fixern rumzuschlagen, sich einen Druck zusammenzuschlauchen,
In den Schatten der Großstadt, wo das Leben billig ist und Träume sich in Rauch auflösen.
Hier, in den Betonwüsten, kämpfen wir mit unseren Dämonen,
Auf der Suche nach einem Funken Hoffnung in einem Meer aus Beton.
This adaptation tries to capture the essence of Hamlet’s existential questioning while reflecting the jargon and atmosphere of the urban underbelly of 1970s Germany. The phrases “sich einen Druck zusammenzuschlauchen” (to shoot up), “Fixer” (addict), and “H” (Heroin) are woven into the fabric of this interpretation, highlighting the desperation and struggle inherent in both Hamlet’s soliloquy and the lives of the youth in “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.”
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I think this is the correct answer, @davideroccato. Here’s my reasoning:
I did not know the term, and the only result when searching it on Google is the book Davide is reading. (Amusingly, DuckDuckGo’s first result is… this very forum thread!) I assume therefore that, ChatGPT’s claims notwithstanding, “zusammenschlauchen” is not a fixed term, but an ad-hoc compound using the cited meaning of “schlauchen” as “to mooch, to freeload”. “Zusammen-” as a verb prefix often means bringing together a collection – in this case, collecting a single fix’s worth of the drug by means of begging/mooching from others.
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Shakespeare in Middle English? Isn’t that a bit of an anachronism? 
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Peter must have missed posting the step where he asked ChatGPT to convert Shakespeare to Middle English =)
I hadn’t noticed that he had mentioned Middle English in his post. I wondered why it was even harder to read than I remembered! Now I know!
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Oh, I see. It’s a ChatGPT translation into Middle English. Fair enough. I wonder how accurate it is Most of it seems to be just archaic respellings, but I recall Middle English being more different from Modern English than that
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The “beauty” of GPTs is that we can have “any” style we want:
Say William Gibson’s cyberpunk style and Rimbaud’s destruction of primary references in “Illuminations” where the internal sounds / rhetorical connections between words prevail.
(Well, I just love Rimbaud… That’s why he’s one of my favorite GPT styles 
).
At first I wanted to have a Shakespeare paragraph in the style of Donald Duck, mixed with the street slang of late 1970s Berlin referring to Christiane’s book, but then I didn’t want to “torture” Shakespeare like that.
Anyway, we can have all the styles we want using such GPTs: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English or Modern English, sounding like someone from the Mississippi Delta or the Australian outback, etc.
The problems with such creative style mixes are:
-
One probably has to be a native speaker to understand all the semantic nuances.
E.g.: “[…] die Drucks und Pfeile von einem miesen Schicksal zu ertragen”.
This sentence (without “Drucks und”) is semantically ok (in a metaphorical sense).
However, the sentence “die Drucks von einem miesen Schicksal zu ertragen” is semantically borderline, so that even the metaphors threaten to collapse. Of course, we could switch to “den Druck”, for ex., to save the semantics. -
The permanent problem of factual correctness when using GPTs:
Even as native speakers of Germans, we generally don’t know how addicts spoke in this particular scene at this particular time in this particular place. This is a special sociolinguistic knowledge that most native speakers don’t have. Non-native speakers usually find it even more difficult to judge…
The general lesson to be learned here is that genAIs are awesome as creative tools, but they are misused when people think they can rely on them to be factually correct.
And the same goes for SLA based on genAIs…
For more background info about this topic, see this short and sweet course by Prof. Jules White on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/trustworthy-generative-ai
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Yes, sorry. I didn’t want to make it “too” easy for native speakers of English
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Well, I have a few in this sentence but the only one I’m not sure is Trebegängerinnen. I can guess Trip-Probiererinnen and Fixerbräute. Thanks
“Ich machte sie in der U-Bahn und im Sound aus, die kleinen Hasch- und Trip-Probiererinnen, die sich schon so anzuziehen versuchten wie Fixerbräute, die zwölf- und dreizehnjährigen Trebegängerinnen, die im Sound rumlungerten.”
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Hi Davide,
not part of my vocabulary, but it means:
“… gängerinnen” = female variant. For ex.:
- der Fußgänger (male) → plural: die Fußgänger
- die Fußgängerin (female) → plural: die Fußgängerinnen
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Thanks @PeterBormann. The definition of Trebegänger is: jugendlicher Ausreißer (besonders in der Großstadt), der sich ohne festen Wohnsitz und ohne Arbeit herumtreibt.
Basically a runaway? Or sort of errant child that doesn’t know where to go. I take this as possibility.
EDIT: I have also found that Trebe seems to mean runaway as well.
auf Trebe gehen: to run away from home
auf Trebe sein: to be a runaway
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Yes, but I’d say it’s not a common word. Personally, I’d just use “Ausreißer, ein Ausreißer sein…” in these situations.
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I did not know the word Trebe at all. Might mean that its use is/was limited geographically (I’m Swiss) or temporally (I’m a millennial).
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@fabbol the story is located in Gropiusstadt, in the west side of Berlin. Probably most of the language comes from there, with a mix of the journalists that curated the book, and the language used by Christiane that was a teenager.
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