property

noun · Vermögen

Vermögen when property is the asset pool, Sache when it is a thing, Eigentum when it names the right, and the German gate sits in § 90 BGB, Sachen are corporeal objects only, so rights, claims and data are property in English and no Sache in German, they move by assignment, never by conveyance.

Which translation, when

Vermögenproperty as the asset pool, what a company owns, what insolvency reaches, the collective sense of the English word.

Sachethe thing, and the statute defines it narrowly, § 90 BGB, körperliche Gegenstände only, with animals set apart, § 90a BGB, though the Sachen rules apply to them mutatis mutandis.

Eigentumownership, where property names the right itself rather than the assets it covers, geistiges Eigentum included for the IP world.

Why

English property is a warehouse of a word and German unpacks it at the door. The pool sense is das Vermögen, the property of the company, the debtor’s assets. The thing sense is die Sache, and § 90 BGB is the gate, Sachen im Sinne des Gesetzes sind nur körperliche Gegenstände, animals set alongside by § 90a BGB. The gate is load-bearing, the core of the Sachenrecht, conveyance, possession, pledge of movables, runs on corporeal objects, the third book reaching rights only by express extension, so receivables, software licences and data are property in English and no Sachen in German, rights travel by assignment, not by Übereignung. Data sharpens the point, to date German law knows no property right in data as such, contracts and licences do the work the English noun merely implies. The right sense is das Eigentum, established in geistiges Eigentum for the IP family, though the professional literature often prefers Immaterialgüterrechte. And one homonym is innocent, the properties of a material are its Eigenschaften, correct German, dangerous only when the property that shall pass at completion mutates into an attribute.

Typical mistakes

Die Eigenschaft geht über for the property shall pass mutates ownership into an attribute, the passing thing is das Eigentum, and Eigenschaften are what materials have.
The § 90 gate is load-bearing, claims, software as such and data are not Sachen, so drafting that übereignet them attempts a conveyance German law does not run, rights travel by Abtretung.
To date German law knows no property right in data as such, die Daten gehören uns translates a business hope, not a legal position, contracts and licences do the actual work.

What matters

Asset schedules sort themselves through the gate: the tangible property transfers by Übereignung, the receivables by Abtretung, and the data rows move by licence and contract, because § 90 BGB keeps Sachen corporeal and to date nobody owns data as such. The schedule that übereignet its customer databases promises a transfer the system cannot book.

Authority

§ 90 BGB
§ 90a BGB

What the machine misses

Property scatters in machine output across Eigentum, Vermögen, Immobilie and, at the low point, Eigenschaft, ownership mutating into an attribute. The German gate never makes the trip, Sachen are corporeal only, rights and data are not among them, so the translated conveyance of intangibles reads fluent and books nothing, the wrong instrument for things that were never things.

Examples

the property of the company	das Vermögen der Gesellschaft
intellectual property	das geistige Eigentum
movable property	bewegliche Sachen
the properties of the material	die Eigenschaften des Materials