My question...are direct translations of entire articles, even when credited, fair use? I'm pretty sure that they are not -- I know they wouldn't pass muster at the university copy center...

Germany is a fellow signatory to the Berne convention, so they have pretty close Copyright laws to ours, and we recognize their copyrights. A translation is a "derivative work", and creation of derivative works is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Further, it is unlikely that our doing so would fall under "fair use" if we used the whole derivative work rather than just a small excerpt from it. 0