German Translation of Auras

I played in the 9th Edition Release Event last weekend. I finished 5th in an event that paid special prices to the top 4. Of course if we had have 17 players instead of 16 it would have paid the to the top 9. But I’m not bitter, no …

Apart from that I noticed a possible problem with the German templating of the Aura cards. “Enchant foo” is translated with “Fooverzauberung”. Now this is consistent to how Enchant cards were translated. But while this translation worked well when you had rather simple fragements like “Enchant Permanent”, “Enchant Swamp”, or even “Enchant Artifact Creature” I fear that it will not work well with the flexibility of the Enchant keyword.

Here is why: The literal translation of “Verzauberung” is “Enchantment”, so the word is a noun. “Fooverzauberung” then becomes “Foo Enchantment”. So far so good. But imagine more complex Enchant keyword like “Enchant black or greeen creature”. This can’t be translated like this. The English equivalent of the German translation would be “Black or green creature enchantment”. Now the words “black or green” refer to the “enchantment” part instead of the “creature” part, which is just wrong. This is not a black or green enchantment after all.

I am not sure how to solve this problem, except by changing the translation template to match the English template; use the word “verzaubern” and everything is fine: “Verzaubere schwarze oder grüne Kreatur” works and means exactly the same as “Enchant black or green creature”.