The original "Blinkenlights"
Perhaps you have seen the above notice in mock-German. It used to be found in many computer labs and was funny to most English speakers brought up on diet of WW2 movies with bumbling or sadistic Nazis rattling off semi-German in short sentences with various dodgy German accents. It first appeared in 1955 at IBM and was widespread around the English speaking world during the 1960s and onward. It is quite famous and has it's own Wikipedia page!
Now I first saw this on work experience during my Computer Science degree in the mid 1980s and I found it amusing, but I saw of course that it was not proper German and I wondered what the Germans thought of it... Most of them I guess are mystified by why English speakers would think a bunch of words that are more English than German should be taken as German. Others who have seen Hogan's Heroes and other dodgy WW2 movies simply dismiss it as mock-German, which it is.
But I wondered: Could it be made into proper German and still keep the joke? This I have attempted to do and I invite you to read it and form your own opinion. Hopefully the joke is still there for English speakers and it now makes sense in German. It may not be funny in German but at least it's correct!
Thanks to Julia Mischke, (a native speaker), for correcting my German. As any student can tell you: "Deutsch-Grammatik ist schwer!"
My new take on the idea: "Diese Maschine"
Warren Mars - November 2015
You can download a PDF of this in an appropriate font here and stick it on the technical equipment of your choice.
If you are still mystified by the German you can get Google to translate it for you here