[antir-heralds] Latin for motto

[Craig Simons]

Arqai wrote:

Entering your phrase yields: 
Quispiam donatus quoque libere est pensus parum

BUT (here's where the warning comes in)  That is a literal translation of each word, one at a time.  It pretty much ignores any proper sentence structure of the language translated to.  And the tenses should be thoroughly checked as well.

******************

Yes, yes, yes!!!

A couple of years ago I ran into somebody trying to translate something from Spanish into English using an online translator.  They kept getting Spanish words spit back at them because it couldn't conjugate verbs or tenses correctly.  Out of curiosity, I decided to try it with some Italian.  I wrote a short paragraph in English and then translated myself into Italian.  I then entered the English into Babelfish and was rewarded with a goofy and quite funny translation.  Out of yet more curiosity, I entered the Italian that I wrote into Babelfish.  It spit out garbled English mixed with Italian words and made no sense at all.

I was giggling to myself over it for about an hour, so I decided to present it to my Italian class the next day and my professor was rolling on the floor in laughter at the translations that came out of the thing.  She'd heard bad conjugation and grammar, but never anything sooo outlandish and wrong as the online translator.  Here's a small spot of the "research" I did that evening:

Italian:
Studio l'italiano da sedici anni.

Proper English translation:
I have been studying Italian for sixteen years.

Babelfish Engloid translation:
Study l' Italian from sixteen years.

It completely missed the conjugation of "studio" (literally "I study," in this context it means "I have been studying").  It didn't understand the proper eliding of the definite article "il."  And it missed the proper translation of the preposition "da" in this context.

Nothing pays quite as well as KNOWING a language and how to use it.  A spot of research can help out anybody wishing to translate into a foreign language so that one does not look like a buffoon who just met the internets.  And if in doubt, just ask somebody how knows.  There's a pretty good chance that they won't be offended, but instead delighted to be of assistance.

-Valentino