Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly: LEBEN

Not   all the members of the family of words and phrases that gather around leben  /Leben, namely erleben, Erlebnis, nahedem Leben, and lebensnah, can be brought into English with living/life and its variants because the element of experience so crucial for an understanding of erleben, Erlebnis, nahe dent Leben and lebensnah is not present in the English word life.

How to translate erleben and Erlebnis? For Erlebnis we decided to use its standard English translation, namely lived-experience, which clearly preserves the element of experience. However, in order to render erleben into English, we opted for live-experience ("live" read as an adjective) as an experience that is on-going and is actually occurring. We found that the options "life-experience" and "life’s experience" run the risk of being confused with the factual experience that is accumulated in the course of a given life. On the other hand  , the English word life is perfectly suitable for the rendition of the German nahe dem Leben and lebensnah. We translated both these expressions with "true to life" since in German these expressions point to a state of affairs which can be measured by nothing other than factual life.