German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
If I want to say that my arm is bruised i.e. having (a) bruise(s)
noun: bruise; plural noun: bruises an injury appearing as an area of discoloured skin on the body, caused by a blow or impact rupturing underlying blood vessels. "his body was a mass of bruises after he had been attacked"
All the translators merely return 'verletzt' but this seems not quite right. I mean your arm might be injured but it could be broken/burnt/throbbing and these would not convey the correct sense of pain.
Bruises are called blaue Flecken in German, and there's no adjective for that. You have to rephrase.
Du hast da einen blauen Fleck.
You have a bruise there.
Dein Arm ist voller blauer Flecken.
Your arm is full of bruises.
Another proposal:
It is not specific concerning the kind of damage and may also be used for things. A nice aspect is, that the corresponding substantive Läsion is a medical term.
Falls es ein Adjektiv (in dem Fall: eine adjektivische Phrase) als Übersetzung für bruised sein soll, so schlage ich
grün und blau
vor. Das wird - wenigstens dort, wo ich herkomme - als Ausdruck für "mit Hämatomen übersät" verwendet, etwa so:
Jemand hat ihn grün und blau geschlagen.
Sein Gesicht war grün und blau.
The layman's terms are der Bluterguss/Blutergüsse and der blaue Fleck/blaue Flecke(n). A black eye is called "blaues Auge" or "Veilchen". There is no adjective directly corresponding to "bruised", you would use an expression like
Sein Arm war voller blauer Flecke / voller Blutergüsse.
Sein Arm war mit blauen Flecken übersät.
The medical term is Hämatom, the (German) Wikipedia article lists more special cases, names and definitions.
Related vocabulary: die Beule (bulge, bump), die Abschürfung (abrasion, grazing), die Schramme (scratch), Striemen (weals), die Schwellung (swelling)
There is not a single word to translate "bruised" - but German has the wonderful expression "Blaue Flecken". So a sentence like "his body was a mass of bruises afther he had been attacked" could translate to "Sein Körper war nach den Angriffen von blauen Flecken übersät".
When referring to your arm you might go for something like "an meinem Arm habe ich einige blaue Flecken".
A single adjective that would get the meaning across quite precisely, albeit by metaphor, is verdellt. A Delle is specifically a kind of damage inflicted by blunt impact. The actual meaning is dent, typically in metal, often on car bodies. This doesn't really correspond to the appearance of bruises, but I think it would be understood what's meant.
Note that there is also verbeult, which would be more commonly used for a car with lots of dents in it. The term Beule is indeed commonly used for impact injuries, but not so much coloured bruises but rather the kind of bumps one gets from hitting the head on something.
