Deutsch
Today I translated a letter from German into English.
Well actually, I'm not sure that it actually qualifies as English.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I took one year of high school German, in which we learned "O tannenbaum, O tannenbaum", how to make gingerbread houses, oh yeah, and a bit of German vocabulary and grammar.
As you know, the first step in translating anything after having only one year of high school language, is to visit freetranslation.com. There you can input the text selection and hope that you are given something that looks vaguely more familiar.
But one thing about German is that it uses liberal use of vowels with umlauts. And one thing about many email systems is that any special punctuation is replaced with an odd assortment of letters and symbols. And one thing about freetranslation.com is that they don't translate odd assortments of letters and symbols.
And so, like a child decoding a message on the back of a cereal box, I had to guess which odd assortment of letters and symbols correlated to which strange letter in the German alphabet.
And then there is the matter of catching typos and correcting the spelling so that the word can be recognised.
And then there is the wonderful quality of the German language where you can pile all sorts of words together in a super-duper compound word... but then what if it isn't meant to be a compound word and there is supposed to be a space or two in there instead?
But finally, finally, I thought I had figured it all out and pushed the "translate" button and started to read the finished product.
Very choppy, to be sure. And then, smack dab in the middle, was the word "vis-à-vis". Accent and all.
What kind of English translation is that?
Well actually, I'm not sure that it actually qualifies as English.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I took one year of high school German, in which we learned "O tannenbaum, O tannenbaum", how to make gingerbread houses, oh yeah, and a bit of German vocabulary and grammar.
As you know, the first step in translating anything after having only one year of high school language, is to visit freetranslation.com. There you can input the text selection and hope that you are given something that looks vaguely more familiar.
But one thing about German is that it uses liberal use of vowels with umlauts. And one thing about many email systems is that any special punctuation is replaced with an odd assortment of letters and symbols. And one thing about freetranslation.com is that they don't translate odd assortments of letters and symbols.
And so, like a child decoding a message on the back of a cereal box, I had to guess which odd assortment of letters and symbols correlated to which strange letter in the German alphabet.
And then there is the matter of catching typos and correcting the spelling so that the word can be recognised.
And then there is the wonderful quality of the German language where you can pile all sorts of words together in a super-duper compound word... but then what if it isn't meant to be a compound word and there is supposed to be a space or two in there instead?
But finally, finally, I thought I had figured it all out and pushed the "translate" button and started to read the finished product.
Very choppy, to be sure. And then, smack dab in the middle, was the word "vis-à-vis". Accent and all.
What kind of English translation is that?
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