Michkov wrote: ↑5 years ago
PTRACER wrote: ↑5 years ago
Yes, the original newspapers sometimes say "Nordschleife/Südschleife" instead of "Nordkurve/Sudkurve". Perhaps a German speaker could correct me, but I took this to mean 'Northern Loop' and 'Southern Loop'....because those hairpins were kind of 180-degree loops rather than tight hairpins. I edited them all out, except for this one. The word hairpin isn't mentioned once, anywhere, so I presume that word wasn't in use yet.
Seems like a perfectly viable option to me. Nordschleife means literally northern loop. The Nürburgring has just made the term it's own over the years, but from a linguistic standpoint there is nothing special about the term Nordschleife.
.......
To add to the confusion there used to be the so called 'Betonschleife' as well.
The proper nouns 'Nordschleife' as well as 'Südschleife' were rather quickly made up to make clear, that a race would only take place in the northern part, the long loop or the in the southern end, the shorter loop. In German, it usually reads 'Nürburgrings Nordschleife' or 'Nürburgrings Südschleife'.
Only on instances when both were combined, the term Nürburgring was used alone. Actually, if you talk about racing on the Nürburgring in German today and if you use the term 'Nordschleife' as a proper noun alone as in 'the 24h race on the Nordschleife' , everyone knows where you are.
You may also find the term 'Südschleife' in these days still but in most cases it is usually just a lightly wrong referral to the GP circuit.
The other thing is translating location names. It can make sense but usually it doesn't. For example, I'm still to find an article (again in German) about Donington where Redgate is called 'rotes Tor', for example. Of course, the location name (Redgate in this case) is used as a proper noun.
According to a mate in Canada, who spent most of the second half of his life as an English teacher, proper nouns do not get translated. And it makes sense. Or would you translate location names such as Hohe Acht, Schwedenkreuz, Döttinger Höhe, Wehrseifen ?
In most English texts I've read on the Nürburgring the Nordschleife gets described as northern loop once or twice and then the proper name gets used again.