Entwurfangestellte

A friend is translating a German-language resume. The person was an Entwurfangestellte at Manitoba Bridge and Engineering works. Translation uncertain. I am posting this hear just in case someone knows what that meant, or what it could have been.

Entwurf is blueprint, draft, or proposal; angestellte is white-collar worker, but also clerk. The word for draftsman is a different word.

Anyone have an idea?

In German it's someone who works on a design (typically architecture or structural engineering) and contributes to it but does not have a responsible role in it, i.e. will also not appear in name in the design itself.

An example for this would be a structural engineer who does calculations for bridges designed by an office, while another person at the offie may work similarly on fine aesthetic elements - and only the business owner or project manager who they work for appears as responsible for the design later on.

Since the term is not an official job designation it may be beneficial in the translation to instead describe the job the person did (i.e. drawing or calculations or similar).

Thanks, Kato!

I neglected to mention that the resume being translated belongs to a friend's student's deceased grandfather, so no one actually knows precisely what he did in the job. His previous job was as a lathe operator. But your explanation will give the family a little better idea of what was going on.

From the info in all previous posts , my guess would be it is something to do with "translating" blueprints to a form early types of cnc machines used to provide some degree of automation. Such items could be a pattern that the machine would copy to produce a similar item , to a series of punched holes in a card that would correspond to the necessary actions the machine had to take. But I'm just guessing , based on machinery I have seen in museums , and an early part of my apprenticeship , where i had to produce drawings and patterns for a gas profile cutter to follow . Great job on cold mornings.

'

I've only really seen the term in relation to architecture. Could also be that he was e.g. creating small custom 3D model buildings based on an architect's plans for showing off designs. There are companies specialized in this kind of one-off custom architecture model building, nowadays mostly heavily computer-based with someone translating the plans for CNC lathes.

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 11:16 am A friend is translating a German-language resume. The person was an Entwurfangestellte at Manitoba Bridge and Engineering works. Translation uncertain.

German is my mother tongue, and "Entwurfangestellte" sounds odd.

"Entwurfsangestellte" with an "s" between the two words would be more sound grammatically, and "Entwurfsangestellter" with an "r" at the end would be the masculine variant of the word ("...angestellte" without the "r" is a female employee). However, even with those changes, it still is a very uncommon word.

Hi! It came to me as Entwurfangestellte, but that could have been a typo by my friend: it only appears once in the email from the friend who asked. The friend who asked is an American historian of Germany, who works with German documents all the time, so I'm not surprised that a word she had to ask about is an unusual word. She was translating the resume of one of her students' grandfather. The man in question had immigrated to Canada, held this job, and later written his resume, so (1) his actual job title was in English and he had to choose a German word for it and (2) his own German might have gotten a little rusty over the years. I have no German language to speak of; would someone typically create a new compound word by adding some task or object to angestellter, or are there certain preexisting compounds with angestellter? (Just curious.)

Hi there,
even for me, as a native speaker, it's difficult to decrypt this unusual term "Entwurfsangestellte(r)".

I can only guess, that this means a person who's in charge for doing drafts ("Entwürfe") or draftsheets ("Entwurfs-pläne/-zeichnungen") for further developing, maybe in the ingeneering or construction business.

Sorry, but the -even for Germans- sometimes difficult or complicated jobnames, especially when it comes to buerocratic terms, are hard to translate. Still today, some assignements tend to stretch the common language to unknown horizons. But... there are developements in the english speaking world, that go in the same direction, like "Second Managing Executive Director in Chief". That's not much better...

GeorgeR wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:20 am "Entwurfsangestellte" with an "s" between the two words would be more sound grammatically

Just to nitpick - actually, while colloquially most Germans would do it : adding in an s inbetween in the compound word would be grammatically wrong, as it would infer an internalized possessive genitive that is not present (an "Entwurfsangestellter" would be an "Angestellter des Entwurfs").

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 10:27 pm would someone typically create a new compound word by adding some task or object to angestellter, or are there certain preexisting compounds with angestellter? (Just curious.)

Short answer: Depends on the actual job.

Long answer:

In many cases companies will invent some sort of "generalized" term that vaguely describes what the job deals with and then simply add a work describing employment to it, such as: -arbeiter (worker), -angestellter (employee), -mitarbeiter (coworker), -helfer (assistant), -leiter (person in charge).

These "generalized" terms can form compounds of about anything, but often tend to be very simple in:
- describing a particular level of process or branch of company (draft, production, store, sales etc...)
- describing whatever the person handles with special qualification (machinery, vehicles...)
- describing the form of employment (contracted, salaried, temporary, something like that)

An "Entwurfangestellter" would be a salaried employee (Angestellter) that has to do with a draft (Entwurf) and therefore either:
- works with or on drafts in any capacity
- works in a draft department of a company, but not necessarily on drafts specifically
- is a "prototype employee" themselves

What it means depends a bit on how abstract the description is - i.e. in this case you're either:
- describing the individual that actually works
- describing the department (while not differentiating between the people who work there)
- describing a job within a draft (which you won't see outside very specific planning documents).