Posted on 12/15/2017 6:11:21 AM PST by notdownwidems
Freepers: I am in the process of translating, for the first time, a non-fiction book from it's original German into English. As a non-German speaker, I am attempting to use Google Translate, and a painstaking paragraph-by-paragraph mode. However, there are some letters in the original text that are not present on an English keyboard. Particularly a letter that resembles a stylized capital B. Not knowing what sound this iteration represents, I have been using guesswork to try to overcome my ignorance, with only mixed results. For instance, the sentence "Junge Burgersohne, die bisher Sportseglermutzen getragen hatten, lie(stylized B)en sie jetzt lieber zu Hause" renders, upon translation, the nonsensical "Young Burgersohne, who had previously worn Sportsegler caps, now love them at home. " when I interpret the unknown letter as an actual 'B', ie 'lieben'. Does anyone here know German and can direct me as to how to 'retranslate' the unknown character to effect a correct translation? Any help one can give would be greatly appreciated. Note to Moderator: I have posted this in the Bloggers and Personal forum; if that is incorrect, please move to the appropriate forum. Thanks!
The stylized capital B is a double s.
They weird ‘B’ is pronounced like it was a double S....................
Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but can’t you cut and paste that letter from some random site?
ließen
Put that in a translation program and you don’t need to find the letter on your keyboard.
On the link I posted, there’s a little keyboard in the lower left corner that has all the characters you need for that particular language...............
By Mark Twain.
Translated as:
Young citizens without previously worn hats sports sailors had to stay at home, let them now.
Kinda lost something in the translation..............
Ping.
its liessen ( the B is a double s)
“now leave them at home”
Young fellows, who had previously worn sporty sailor-caps, now preferred to leave them at home.
I don’t speak or read German, but Wikipedia has a nice phonetic guide to German letters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography#Alphabet
Using Google Translate - or any non-human translator - is a terrible idea.
Regards,
The Umlaute are missing, also.
Should read: "Junge Bürgersöhne" (i.e., young, high-status males).
Regards,
Hast du eine bessere Idee?
Ja, vergiss das Projekt!
Das ist Loser-Talk! Gib mir etwas, das ich benutzen kann.
Imagine you are taking something written in one dialect of English you barely understand and you are rewriting it into another dialect of English. There will be many phrases where you understand the literal words but you won’t understand the true meaning. You won’t even know you are missing something. Now multiply that. Google translate might do okay with something simple like “attach part A to part B” but not much beyond that. A good translation is art and the translator needs to have a very good fluent knowledge of the source language and also the culture and be able to bring that in a translation that will be readable and accurate.
The Umlaute was one of the very first things I was taught in 57-60 as a military dependent in Germany. The city Nurnburg had an umlaute over the u. I had a German teacher who was German and spoke fluent English. I liked the way he taught language as he would give us twenty words a day to learn. We learned many words and he also taught the proper verbs and prepositions. I had to take another language in the Army and the teacher was not as good.
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