Thanks for your responses, amk & Nirak.
Mea culpa: I should have mentioned that I'm well aware that there's a difference between "picking" (e.g. fruit from the tree) and "gathering/collecting/picking up" (the fallen fruit). I should also have made it clearer that I was not asking about the French, which I'm very familiar with.
What I'm curious about is whether aufsammeln and auflesen are also used for the third type of harvest, which takes place in Agnès Varda's film. It happens after the farmer and his crew have completed their harvest, but there is still some produce - in this case potatoes - left in the field. Instead of just letting them rot, the farmer allows anyone who needs food, but can't afford to actually buy it, to come into his fields and harvest whatever is left for free.
Nirak and any other native speakers, please enlighten me! How do you express this in German? I've been a professional D>E translator for many years, but I consider myself a perennial student!
@amw: I'm still in my right mind... so far. ;-)
I'll grant you that to glean is an old word and can absolutely be used to lend a poetic tone, conjuring times gone by like Millet's famous painting "The Gleaners," but it is in fact still very much in use in this specific context. After all, that is why they translated the title of the film (released in the US in 2000) into English as "The Gleaners and I" not just for the poetry, but also simply because that's the word for it.
