German 4 Dummies: "Vorratsdatenspeicherung"

Another day, another German compound. Luckily, there is a very official translation of this string made out of "Vorrat" (inventory, stock, reserve), "Daten" (data) and "Speicherung" (storage, retention).

The Court of European Justice has been dealing with the EU Data Retention Directive for years, and the official German translation of it is right here.

Now, having established that "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" is German for "Data Retention", let's marvel for a minute at the German term and what you could call a doubling up or reinforcement of the "retention" part. We have "stock, storage" plus "retention" in German as opposed to the English.

Why is this important?

For one, data retention is a requirement in many areas of business and government. Companies must retain data for certain periods of time, individuals must retain invoices and bank statements for years in case the tax man cometh to check.

For this aspect of data retention, Datenspeicherung is a commonly used German term.

"Vorrat" comes in when they talk of retaining telecommunications and internet metadata (thanks to media reports on the last 12 months, we don't have to explain this term any more).

"Vorrat" is a widely used word for something largely positive. Overwhelmingly, "Vorrat" is good or neutral, good in the sense of the squirrel making a "Vorrat" of nuts for the winter, a company having a reserve of spare tires or ingredients for whatever goods they manufacture.

TheEditor of the K-Landnews also maintains a large "Vorrat" of invectives and slang terms for use in posts.

In short, "Vorrat" indicates a reserve for later use.

When the German media and public talk about "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" the aspect of later use is always right there, unlike - TheEditor claims - in the English version.

We have no idea how the Germans came to call data retention in the surveillance sense "Vorratsdatenspeicherung". Maybe they wanted to be very specific and did not fully appreciate the dark side of "Vorrat", maybe they even thought the positive generic connotation of "Vorrat" would make it more palatable to the more distrustful segments of the public.

The coiners of the term could have opted for the bland Datenretention, for instance. "Retention" is one of the many "foreign words" or rather "learned words" available to Germans. Used in medicine, commerce and law, it would have kept the dimension of "keeping this for later when we need it or have time to go through" out of the vacuuming up of your most private communications connections.

Whatever they thought of their term, the debate ain't over.