Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-129.70.221.18-20161201110626

Hi everyone, in my regular cooperations with Chinese universities, I have encountered the problem how to translate the job names in german academia into english.

In germany there are (almost) only two positions: professor (with a chair, tenured) and "wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiter". The latter is usually required to teach and to do research (of course, the better/luckier you are, the less you teach). [And yes, there are exceptions like project based positions, there are LBA and so on, but they do not matter here].

I wanted to do some teaching exchange/cooperation with Chinese universities, but Chinese universities would like to have "lecturers" send (and not "post-docs"). My impression was, that the Chinese guys don't want to get second rate teachers, and I don't want to give the impression I want to trick them. I am not sure if I should tell them our "wissenschaftliche mitarbeiter" are equivalent to lecturers?

Does anyone have any experiences what counts as equivalence between germany and UK? (There must be some guys who hopped between the systems). 