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I was reading a b-school case about SAP when I saw the interesting term "vorlagenhandwerker". Supposedly, an SAP executive had called German software engineers by that name. Despite being a native speaker of German, I had never heard of it.
The solution to this little riddle came to me by typing the term into my browser's search box. "Vorlagenhandwerker" is a term created by the machine translation program of a company called Qwika that translates Wikipedia articles from the English Wikipedia into German, with predictably unpredictable results. "Vorlagenhandwerker" is the translation of "master craftsman", at least according to this company. The whole description is pretty humorous, see the following screenshot.
Unfortunately, this translation is completely wrong. My guess is that the translation program interpreted "master" (from "master craftsman") in the "pattern" rather than "expert" sense and then cobbled together the German translation of pattern, which is "Vorlage", with "Handwerker", which means contractor or craftsman.
So... Apparently, the case writer tried to lighten up his or her presentation of SAP by injecting some German words---except that he couldn't speak German, must therefore have googled for a German translation of "master craftsman", and ended up with this rather funny but wholly wrong translation.
What's bad about it is that the case suggests that this is a word a German SAP executive actually used. This seems unlikely, since the word does not exist in the German language. Still, I find this to be rather humorous, and another data point about the quality of b-school cases.
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