Sloppy. And the judgment is aimed at the method, not the outcome.
Schlampig gearbeitet — worked sloppily — can be said of something that came out fine. It means the result cannot be relied on, because the way it was produced would not reliably produce it again.
Every substantial American research university runs an office whose function is to move findings out of the laboratory into products and companies. It has staff, a budget, patent attorneys and revenue targets. Converting knowledge into use is somebody’s full-time job with a reporting line.
The German Stellenbeschreibung is a formal document with defined content: the tasks, the authority, the reporting lines, the substitution arrangements. It is referenced in disputes. What the role contains is a matter of record.
Craft-clean. Said of a law, an article, a piece of engineering or an argument: the work was done properly.
The phrase exists because Germans need to separate two judgments that English tends to run together. A law can be politically wrong and handwerklich sauber. It can also be politically right and handwerklich schlecht, and the second is a real criticism that survives agreement with the aim.
That calculates itself. The German way of saying something makes economic sense, and the verb is reflexive — the figures do the work, not the person arguing for them.
One page at the front, written last, containing the conclusion and the recommended decision. It exists because the person who will act on the report may not read the rest of it, and the document is designed around that possibility rather than against it.
Sorgfaltspflicht. The duty of care. In German liability law, what is examined is whether the required care was exercised in the process — not only what happened as a result.
A person who followed the proper procedure and still caused harm stands differently from one who caused no harm but skipped the procedure.
The process carries legal weight in its own right.
American retraining programmes compress entry to a field into a matter of months, in software, data, nursing and the trades. The premise is that a field can be entered quickly by somebody who was in a different one last year.
An American report ends with them, and a report that ends without them is regarded as unfinished. The analysis is the middle of the document. What the reader should now do is the point of it.
Die Kalkulation. The German word for working out what something must cost — materials, labour, overhead, margin — and the noun is used as though it produces a result rather than an estimate. Das ist so kalkuliert ends a conversation about price. The figure was derived, and the derivation is available.