311–320 of 328 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really curious, where is the gendered information in "valedixit"? I feel like the proposed translation misses that romantic weight by keeping the gender ambiguous. What am I missing?
The thing missing is the context in which the sentence is used. From the comments on stackexchange: "if the context refers to this person enough to make it clear who "she" is, it should also make it clear who "he/she/it/they" is."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the version from Google Translate, " trop souvent " adds a notion of frequency like " too often " would, "avant" is shoehorned as a misplaced compulsory match for " before " when " too many times before " already felt like a ready-made phrase at this point. In yours, " salua " would likely pass as a greeting, while " excessivement " would rather refer to the silly moves she made. Definitely harder to read for me.…
> "Elle a tant de fois dit au revoir" Nice! And sounds better. To be nitpicking, I'd propose "Elle a tant dit au revoir avant" (9 also), which retains the original 'before'.
You could also insert déjà, which conveys the notion of before: Elle a déjà tant dit adieu. Well, this means so many times and not too many times, so you could say: Elle a déjà trop dit adieu (8). This could also be directly translated as she's already said goodbye too much. You can drop already/déjà, but lowers drops the emphasis on before. If you do so, Elle disait tant adieu (6) works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPT4 response: You can translate the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit vale saepe nimis antea". I asked GPT4 whether it could make the translation shorter to which it responded that Latin was inherently a verbose language, so no.
For what it's worth, I asked the same two questions to GPT 3.5 and got: Yes, in Latin, you can say "multum vale" to mean "goodbye many times" or "vale nimis" to mean "goodbye too much"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long. At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
Seems like a modern addition. I've seen quite a few Roman inscriptions in my life, and I don't remember ever noticing any such marker.
The actual inscriptions use heavy abbreviations, which we resolve in our text. And then we also disambiguate V into v and u. And as a bonus we often add the length markers.
So we do inscription -> cleaned Latin text.
And the cleaned text is given to students.
I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order. This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the stru…
If you listen to some podcasts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbsJ-QimQo you should hopefully be able to maintain your Latin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slavic too. In Polish: żegnała (she said goodbye) za często (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy). BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin. BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye
Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.
Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue
Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.
Yup Polish has A LOT of loanwords. Most people don't realize how many. My favorite example is how Polish stole Latin, German and Czech words for color and now each mean different things :) Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same…
I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves.
The Buddha reference is hilarious!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?". It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you. So you may have to use language that Americans un…
What's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that. I think we take for granted that idiom…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could also say that French is 'rather different', not better or more clear. Let alone superior (though I do not know where that claim came from).
If we’re talking about clarity I think there’s some merit to the claim. It has tense markers that English lacks which buys you information in the conjugation about tense, gender and speaker. And unlike other Latin languages you aren’t able to drop the subject and just rely on the verb to convey it which forces clarity one could argue. You get the best of both worlds for clarity though the worst of both worlds for con…
English has (at least) four constructs to talk about the past: "he went", "he was going", "he has gone", and "he used to go". All four mean something clearly different. French meanwhile only has "il allait" and "il est allé" (and, technically "il alla" though nowadays that is basically only used in writing and its meaning is not clearly distinguishable from that of "il est allé").
It's easy to find examples of distinctions made by French that English doesn't make, and vice versa. That doesn't mean that either language, overall, tends to express concepts more precisely than the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that. I think we take for granted that idiom…
10 years ago there was a big fight/shift in the anime translator scene about exactly this. More literal translations with long translator notes were common back then, but eventually the less literal translation won as anime became more mainstream.