Hi friends,
In this post I would like to combine my technical job experience with German language learning. Before I worked as a technical support engineer at Fujitsu. It is obvious that work and learning go hand in hand. That is the best way to achieve high results.
It is a common practice for IT companies delivering technical support across the globe to have mixed team of engineers with different language skills. For example English, Spanish, Italian, German. The same approach was relevant for my PRIMERGY project.
There is no secret, that business needs always determine workforce requirements. However this approach doesn’t work in reality. As a short example, in the team of 14 technical support engineers, only 4 persons had worked with German, despite the majority if our clients were from Germany. It was not possible to assign all German support cases to those 4 persons only. As a result English-speaking colleagues had to proceed with them. This took place at the certain point when the client asked for German speaker.
Interesting fact, most of our clients had fairly no objections. I know, that’s not the best work approach. Still my article is about how beneficial for my colleagues was to learn basic technical terms in German. Even now, when my career path is beyond Fujitsu route, I have no doubts they could easily understand (without any translator!) what do the following ticket short descriptions mean:
🕯️ Server startet/bootet nicht. -> Server doesn’t start/boot.
⛓️💥 Die Festplatte ist ausgefallen. -> Hard drive has failed.
☢️ Der Server wird mit BSOD abgestürzt. -> The server has crashed with BSOD.
🎉 Die Netzwerkkarte nicht erkannt. -> The network card is not recognized.
🛫 Die Lüfter laufen auf Volllast. -> The fans are running at high speed.
🧳 VM kann nicht migriert werden. -> Virtual machine can’t be migrated.
🌩️ Reset am RAID Kontroller aufgetreten. -> RAID Controller reset has occured.
❄️ Backup Jobs werden nicht ausgeführt. -> Backup jobs are not executed.
📀 Das Betriebssystem kann nicht installiert werden. -> The operation system can’t be installed.
🔌 PSU ist ausgefallen. -> Power Supply Unit has failed.
Since your are most probably not IT engineers, in any case you could take some benefit of learning at least basic terminology like “die Festplatte – hard drive”, “das Betriebssystem – operation system”, “die Netzwerkkarte – network card”, few useful verbs “booten – to boot”, “installieren – to install”, “ausführen – to execute”.
Finally you can try to build your own sentences with those words. If you are Windows user (I know you are), try to sketch following phrases.
Mein Laptop bootet problemlos. – My laptop boots without any problems.
Das neue Programm lässt sich nicht ausführen. – The new program can’t be executed (run).
Ich habe eine externe Festplatte an den Rechner angeschloßen. – I have connected an external hard drive to the computer.
Remember, the one who never makes mistakes, is the man who never does nothing.
See you later, friends. Auf Wiederhören.
See also another articles:
German spelling alphabet with real examples
Few quick tips regarding German learning with practical examples
30 useful German phrases for daily conversation
