I’ve just come across the following German sentence which looks like a translation of an English text: Auch wenn Sie nicht all diese Einkommensstränge verfolgen möchten, werden Sie lernen, wie jeder einzelne von ihnen funktioniert.
How would you translate this sentence back into English? Here is my suggestion:
Even if you don’t want to pursue all of these income streams, you will learn how each of them works.
What do you think of this sentence?
Thanks,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]
Many thanks for your swift response. You are right, “sources of income” or “income sources” is a good translation for “Einkommenstsstränge” and business people sometimes talk about “income sources and revenue streams” and it seems to me that the German who translated this sentence thought that “revenue stream” and “Einkommenstrang” sound similar so he went for “Einkommensstränge”. However, to me the word “Einkommensstränge” sounds quite unnatural and triggers the imagine of another German compound that is made of “-strang”.[YSaerTTEW443543]
You translated the sentence correctly in the first place, Torsten. Especially in personal finance, people talk about “streams of income” or “income streams”. Often this involves passive income, such as income from rental properties, from stock dividends, from a web business that runs itself, etc. The idea is that this is income that flows in without the person having to do much to keep it going, other than checking it once in a while and doing an occasional tweak.
A source of income that stops when you stop isn’t a stream of income.