I would hope that a reasonably educated person could puzzle out the date/time example you gave (though as you note, some peoples' minds may simply not naturally work that way). One thing to watch out for, though, is that a fair number of readers might unthinkingly assume that any snippets of German they saw couldn't possibly be very important to the plot, which might lead the reader to skip over them whether she would have been able to figure out the basics or not. [Some people treat Tolkien's poetry the same way, and I'll admit that in most cases they aren't all that wrong.]
As for the second example, I wouldn't even assume that people would see the "God and pigs and names" connections. With careful effort, odds are good I'd have a decent guess at that, but to an untrained English speaker's eye the words "Namen" and "Name" look like proper names themselves ('cause why else would they be capitalized?). "Gott" is certainly "God" to anyone who's sung classical music, but many people might think it was a doctor with an advice column. And if someone had decided after a clause or two that they weren't going to understand any of this German gibberish anyway, they might not even notice "schwein" at the end of the quote.
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chiming
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Date: 2010-07-26 07:06 pm (UTC)From:As for the second example, I wouldn't even assume that people would see the "God and pigs and names" connections. With careful effort, odds are good I'd have a decent guess at that, but to an untrained English speaker's eye the words "Namen" and "Name" look like proper names themselves ('cause why else would they be capitalized?). "Gott" is certainly "God" to anyone who's sung classical music, but many people might think it was a doctor with an advice column. And if someone had decided after a clause or two that they weren't going to understand any of this German gibberish anyway, they might not even notice "schwein" at the end of the quote.
That's a weird site, by the way. :)