User's manual vs. User manual

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

David Davis said:
> In German they get around this kind of thing by making compound nouns, so you'd have the equivalent of "Usermanual"  (Benutzerhandbuch...?), but English prefers to leave a space.

Indeed! :) 

Reminds me of the time I was helping a fraternity brother (fluent German speaker) translate a highly technical document from German to English for his summer job and we encountered this (or some similar) word: "SchwebendeElektroMagnetischenFeld" .... and that was one of the simpler compound words there!

The translation we provided in English was "Levitating Electro-Magnetic Field". The word "Schwebende" means something else I think, but the context was MagLev trains, so "Levitating" seemed better to me! :)

I have never forgotten this story even though it has been 40 years now. I ended up sudying German for two semesters the year after that summer - needed it as a foreign language requirement. 

Z