freight
noun · Fracht
In German transport law die Fracht is the money, the remuneration the sender owes for the carriage, § 407 Abs. 2 HGB. English freight means the money in shipping usage but the goods in ordinary American usage, so a clause about freight paid in advance and one about freight damaged in transit use the same word for opposite things, and only one of them is Fracht.
Which translation, when
Why
Freight is a false friend hiding in plain sight, because German and English use the word for different things and both usages appear in the same documents. In German transport law die Fracht is the money: § 407 Abs. 2 HGB obliges the sender to pay the agreed Fracht, and German practice reinforces the meaning with the compound Frachtlohn. The carrier claims it, the consignee can become liable for it on taking delivery, and the carrier has a lien over the goods to secure it. English usage splits. In shipping and forwarding English, freight likewise means the charge, which is why freight prepaid and freight collect make sense as payment terms. In ordinary and particularly in American usage, freight means the goods themselves, so a sentence about freight arriving damaged or freight being inspected at the border is about cargo and not about money. The German rendering then has to change nouns altogether: das Gut in the statutory language, die Ware or die Ladung in commercial usage. A translator who renders every freight as Fracht will produce sentences in which the remuneration is damaged in transit, which is nonsense a reader may not immediately catch in a long document. The trade clauses complete the picture. Freight prepaid and freight collect answer who bears the charge, corresponding roughly to frei Haus and unfrei, and in international sales the Incoterms allocate carriage cost and risk in their own scheme, which sits beside the statutory position rather than replacing it; the passing of risk in the sale itself is held by its own entry.
Typical mistakes
- Die Fracht is the remuneration and not the goods, so rendering freight damaged in transit as Fracht produces a sentence in which money is damaged.
- The statutory word for the thing carried is das Gut, so a translation should switch nouns rather than keep freight throughout.
- Freight prepaid and freight collect are payment terms and not delivery terms, so treating them as Incoterms confuses cost allocation with the transfer of risk.
What matters
Translating a transport document into German: each occurrence of freight should be sorted into Fracht where money is meant and Gut, Ware or Ladung where the goods are, and the payment clauses should be kept apart from any Incoterm.
What the machine misses
Automatic translation renders every freight as Fracht, and German uses that word only for the remuneration owed under § 407 Abs. 2 HGB while the goods themselves are das Gut, die Ware or die Ladung; the uniform rendering produces German sentences in which the payment arrives damaged, a mistake easy to overlook in a long shipping document.
Examples
| the freight is payable on delivery | die Fracht ist bei Ablieferung zu zahlen |
| the freight was damaged in transit | das Gut wurde auf dem Transport beschädigt |
| freight prepaid | frei Haus |
| the carrier has a lien for the freight | der Frachtführer hat ein Pfandrecht für die Fracht |
More notes on these sections
carrier Frachtführer