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Re: translation
Posted By: Howard, on host 68.155.22.22
Date: Sunday, November 12, 2006, at 11:37:05
In Reply To: Re: translation posted by Darien on Saturday, November 11, 2006, at 23:50:03:

> > I never had much spanish that I learned of success. But, I encountered that in dictionary.com, there is a characteristic that translates directly of English to the Spanish. Or <I don't know what trasero means> the other manner for this material, so that my supposes that it is possible now to continue an email conversation with somebody that does not speak any English, only Spanish. I am going to translate this message, so that if you know Spanish, you can tell me how it is well it worked.
> >
> > Better than I thought it would be. I was a bit generous in the translation (giving the benefit of the doubt in a few areas), but mostly that's the meaning of it.
>
> Not to be picky, but you translated oddly in some places. In particular, "to encounter" for encontrar and "the other manner" for "la otra manera" are a bit literalistic - they would generally be understood (and translated) as "to find" and "the other way." But no matter.
>
> "So that my supposes" would be a fair translation of "así que mi supone," but if you look more carefully, that's not what he has. What he wrote is "así que *mí* supone," and the accent makes a fairly substantial difference. I mean, the sentence is nonsense either way ("so that me it supposes?"), but it's substantially different nonsense.
>
> "De inglés al español" is correct: "from English to Spanish." The extra article "el" is a hair strange, but is basically a throwaway - fair to use or not.
>
> That's pretty much all of my specific nitpicks; don't be so strict-constructionist with your word orders, though - Spanish and English sentences aren't built quite the same way, and word-for-word translation tends to produce odd constructions that read strangely. You need to translate sentence-for-sentence and rearrange the words to be proper English form.
>
> Oh, and the mystery word "trasero?" "Butt." One great reason never to rely on a translate-o-bot for anything important. ;-}

Thanks to everybody who replied to that. I expected it to be funny, but side-splitting laughter was beyond my wildest dreams.
Howard

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