Can I use the verb "schaffen" in a sentence "They accomplish their goals"?

Question

Recently I've learned a new verb: schaffen. As the dictionary says, the verb means to accomplish, but also to create. So I thought that in the sentence They accomplish their goals I can use this verb as follows:

Sie schaffen ihre Ziele

However, a couple of translation services I've tried to verify myself (including Google Translate), tend to translate this sentence into:

They create their goals

Though, for example, Bing translator does the job as I expected and uses the meaning to achieve.

I understand that it is probably not the best decision to rely on automated services in this question but these systems are usually trained on huge corpora of texts so a seed of doubt was planted regarding the question which meaning is more popular in the native German speech :)

How do you think you would formulate this sentence? Should it be some other verb, or maybe the whole structure is a sort of unnatural?

Answer 1

The sentence is exactly what someone could say in that context. Nevertheless is „etwas schaffen“ used like that more colloquial. In written newspaper articles you might rather find „Sie erreichen ihre Ziele“.

But regarding your question referring to google translate: don‘t trust these services. Especially when dealing with multiple meanings of a single word they often do a lousy job.

The tricky thing in your example: one could really mean „they create their goals“ when saying „sie schaffen ihre Ziele“ but usually then there would be a context around that sentence or one or two little additional words. For example:

Sie lassen sich ihre Ziele nicht vorgeben: sie schaffen sich ihre Ziele selbst

Answer 2

How do you think you would formulate this sentence? Should it be some other verb, or maybe the whole structure is a sort of unnatural?

'Sie erreichen ihre Ziele.' is for me the best option.

'Sie schaffen ihre Ziele.' Here we have a colloquial usage of schaffen. But for me 'Ziel' belongs to official language. So the two do not match perfectly. I would say 'Sie schaffen, was sie vorhatten.', but 'Sie schaffen, was sie sich vorgenommen haben.' and 'Sie schaffen ihre Ziele.' are mixtures of colloquial/relaxed and official, which annoy in a way. This is a very slight feeling.

'Sie schaffen es, ihre Ziele zu erreichen.' This construction is also possible but contains some redundancy (schaffen plus erreichen). My mixture concern is not relevant here because the usage of 'es', 'erreichen', and the infinitive clause renders the entire sentence official.

Answer 3

Just an addition: Another commonly used expression is "Sie erfüllen ihre Ziele" which means more or less the same thing as "Sie erreichen ihre Ziele". However, you can use the former only with immaterial goals (e.g. the goal to accomplish something) but the latter also has the additional meaning of reaching a destination.