German Abbreviation Resources

Compiled by Dr. Geoffrey S. Koby, Kent State University

Caution: Use at your own risk.
The correctness or completeness of the information provided through these links is the responsibility of their owners.

The compiler teaches commercial, legal and financial translation. Therefore, the coverage of sites here may be uneven.

The first step in understanding any abbreviation is discovering the full or expanded form. Once that has been determined, the next step is to determine whether an official, standard, or accepted translation of the full form already exists, possibly with an official, standard, or accepted acronym in English. If not, the translator is free to create a new translation and even, if appropriate, to create a new abbreviation, acronym, or initialism. (A terminological note: an abbreviation is any shortened form of a word, multi-word term, name, or phrase. Acronyms and initialisms are subcategories of abbreviations, both of which are formed from the initial parts of name. An acronym can be pronounced (e.g., NATO, OPEC), while an initialism cannot (e.g., FBI, BBC). In this article I use abbreviation to cover all three types.)

Note that general abbreviation/acronym pages will provide only general-language information. For more technical or complex abbreviations, the subject-matter-specific glossaries will provide the best information.

The first thing to remember is context, context, context! Like any other words, abbreviations and acronyms are used meaningfully in a text, so translators cannot simply blindly accept the first solution that appears on the screen. Instead, translators have to consider whether that resolution of the abbreviation actually makes sense in the text it came from. When searching on-line for abbreviations, it’s very common to encounter many different full forms for a single abbreviation—and they’re all correct! For this reason, the first strategy when trying to resolve a particular abbreviation is to search in a list of abbreviations for the specific domain of the source text. Then, it’s up to the translator to use knowledge of the source text, professional skill, and common sense to pick the correct full form.

E-mail suggestions for additional sites to be added to the list, or notices of dead sites, to gkoby [AT] kent [DOT] edu.

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General language and collections

Business language

Financial/tax language

Legal language

Technical language (focus area in bold)

Medical language

Miscellaneous

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