Are these two words translated into Hebrew correctly?
May 27, 2013 11:08 PM   Subscribe

my brother is getting a couple tattoos and asked me to make sure these translations check out and yes he knows that each word is given in two different fonts. thanks! Here they are
posted by subarctic_guy to Writing & Language (6 answers total)
 
They seem like good translations to me.

The spelling of tikvah (hope) might be sort of nonstandard though - there it's written with two "vav"s (letter that, among serving other functions, makes a V sound) and I think it could also be written with just one. I think this is sometimes used to distinguish vavs making the V sound from vavs being used more or less as vowels, but I'm a bit rusty on this stuff.
posted by needs more cowbell at 11:36 PM on May 27, 2013 [1 favorite]


Agreeing about "tikvah"; he should verify that double vav. I'm only used to seeing it as the name of the Israeli national anthem, where it only has.

"emunah" looks fine.

(I know just enough Hebrew to get bar-mitzvahed, and not much more.)
posted by benito.strauss at 12:46 AM on May 28, 2013


I believe the spelling of tikvah is the correct one for Modern Hebrew written without vowels (ktiv maleh vs. ktiv khaser): the letter vav is usually just a placeholder for a vowel, but it can act as a consonant as well. The distinction is clear when you write the words with the vowel markings (niqqud) on them, but if you don't then you can double the vav to indicate that it's a consonant. See an example.
posted by katrielalex at 2:15 AM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


You need a trustworthy native speaker who is very literate. Probably more than you can get from Metafilter. (I was bar mitzvahed too, but I know enough to not guess at it.)

One of my translation-industry jobs has been project-managing back-translations of the tattoos for the military. I've done hundreds of 'em. And in all of those hundreds, there was only one where the professional hella-literate translator looked at it and said, "It means /this/!" In all of the rest, the translator would have to write a paragraph like, "Um, I have no idea what this means, it's missing accents, it's mirror-reversed, obviously written by someone who does not speak the language" et cetera.

Only one.

Be that one.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 7:31 AM on May 28, 2013 [6 favorites]


Native Hebrew speaker - both look legit, you can spell Tikva with either one or two Vav, internet seems undecided about what's more correct.
posted by sockpuppetdirect at 7:32 AM on May 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


If he is in the SF Bay area I know of a tattoo artist who had a Jewish dayschool education and has done tattoos in Hebrew before. Memail me if you want their contact info.
posted by needs more cowbell at 11:37 AM on May 28, 2013


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