Hunde haben alle guten Eigenschaften des Menschen.

[zzcguns]

English Translation

Dogs have all the good qualities of people without at the same time possessing their weaknesses.

Something strange is happening with this sentence and its translation.

I could have sworn that the original sentence was longer than this version when I had played it previously.

The English translation is longer, with an additional part (the part that I was sure was there in the German version when I had played this previously).

If I search for this sentence in my version of the Fluency Fast Track I get the pair shown here -

If I search in the general search however, the pair is different with the English translation also made shorter to match the German version -

Note here that the sentence says that it is the same one that is in the Fluency Fast Track, and is also the same as the one in my own collection “FFT Extra Practice”. This isn’t true! I have the sentence pair with the longer version of the English translation.

Then if I go click on the “Source” button from the general search I get the sentence at Hunde haben alle guten Eigenschaften des Menschen, ohne gleichzeitig ihre Fehler zu besitzen. which as you can see is a longer German sentence as I remembered. This is the screenshot from Tatoeba where both sentences are longer -

I don’t see any previous discussion about this sentence (or a similar one) on the forum, so I don’t know why this might have happened.

[morbrorper]

Your findings seem indicative of CM staff intervention, maybe after a user report.

[zzcguns]

Oh yes, I agree.

It just seems strange to me for two reasons - firstly I can’t see what might be wrong with the second part of the sentence pair, and secondly the sentence pair has been changed in two stages (first the German, then the English).

Also, it ruins the meaning of a historical quotation.

On the other hand, I find it interesting that the statement uses des Menschen and not der Menschen (i.e. that appears to me to be the genitive of the singular “human/person” rather than the genitive of the plural “humans/people”).

[pitti42]

“der Mensch” is sometimes used to refer to “the human species”, while “die Menschen” refers to the people as a group. Doesn’t english do this as well? I think “des Menschen” is appropriate in this case, although both would work.

[zzcguns]

Yes, you’re right, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was anything inappropriate about the German sentence.

I could equally well imagine the English sentence here being either “Dogs have all the good qualities of a human …” or “Dogs have all the good qualities of humans …”.

In this case the translator (into English from the German original) had chosen to use “people” and therefore I had expected to see a plural in the German.