Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with translation

ancient latin translation

Dren — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:49:34 -0800

I have a lead medallion (about 150mm dia) which has the following inscription : side #1 ESAVO MC SM [] SORDCMPUAESE {picture of a pikeman} SV side#2 PCM POMEVSAVSEBVCIM * 1309 * {picture of a king} ED The A/R abd U/V are a bit interchangable and the last M has three loops. If anyone could translate or tell me more about it I would be very grateful, cheers

Where can I find English translations of Dada poems online?

bradbane — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:21:02 -0800

Where can I find English translations of Dada poems online? The Digital Dada Library is a great resource, but I can't seem to find anywhere online with English translations. Any help appreciated.

This madeleine, it bites?

jokeefe — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:21:33 -0800

What's the best translation (or, rather, which might you recommend) of Proust's masterwork In Search of Lost Time? A previous question here on Ask yields a vote for Lydia Davis. Can anyone comment as to whether there are other contemporary translations which compare to hers? Many thanks.

La plume de ma meilleur grand-père

fydfyd — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:09:31 -0800

I need a French translation for "World's Best Grandpa" but do not know French. My best candidate is "Le meilleur grand-père sur le monde" which I suspect is too formal, ungrammatical, or hopelessly wrong. I'm also stumbling over the sur/dans distinction and suspect there is likely an idiom which is just better in every way. This is intended to be embroidered on a pillow so brevity and informality are prized in that order.

Always an Ordeal

Nyarlathotep — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:39:39 -0800

My wife and I always joke about the preponderance of shitty luck we have and how if our family had a crest part of it would be the words "Always an Ordeal" written in Latin. I'm thinking I'd like to actually design it as a gift but know nothing of Latin. Anyone out there know how "Always an Ordeal" would be written in Latin?

How many unique words?

OLechat — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:25:24 -0800

How can I determine how many unique words and how many repetitions are in a text? I have a small translation contract and the client has different rates for repetitions and for unique words. How can I find this out? They are Word documents, I'm on a Mac using Word 2004. Is there a program I can download, or a web-based solution?

Recommend an online collaborative translation tool.

tkbarbarian — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:01:01 -0800

Can anybody recommend a good collaborative online translation tool? Not an automated translator, something to help manage and co-ordinate a translation workflow in a team of people. As an example, I have an excel spreadsheet or a database with a list of (not necessarily unique) questions and response options grouped into questionnaires for particular user groups.

I'd like to be able to upload this / import it into an online tool that then:

* breaks up the questions/responses into unique "translation snippets"
* allows individuals to propose translations for snippets in a number of requested languages
* allows moderators to review translations
* support back-translation for moderation as well.
* allow the completed translation "matrix" to be exported into a useful format (either the original database, an internationalisation po file etc.)

I've already got an excel sheet that does this in a specialised case with some scripting for a particular set of questionnaires. Looking for a more general purpose system that's online to ease collaborative headaches.

Any thoughts or starters for how to get this?

I'm explicitly not looking for a "upload your document and have it translated automatically" service. This is in the context of a community of volunteers, experts and internal staff we want to hand-select

the language barrier

d. z. wang — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:13:59 -0800

You're talking to some people about computers when you realize that somehow, they know even less than you do. How do you figure out what they need to hear? How do you phrase it clearly, simply and accurately, but not condescendingly? How do you know when you're screwing that up, and how do you recover? And conversely, when people talk to you about computers, how do you figure out what they mean even when they are using a different set of jargon from what you've learned, or incorrect jargon, or plain don't themselves know what they mean? My job frequently requires me to discuss technical topics with people of all levels of expertise. I can handle myself just fine when I'm the more ignorant one, or when we're about equals, because I just ask a lot of questions, but somehow when I know more than the other guy, things just go south.

To give a recent example, it took me at least five minutes to explain why it would be a waste of IP space to assign every computer a static IP and also reserve it a slot in the DHCP pool. Later that same day, my boss asked me to set up some arrangement that passed through a middleman server for analysis but, in case of technical difficulty, failed down to letting clients send data directly to the destination. It was honestly ten or fifteen minutes before I realized he was saying "direct pass-through" to refer to the failsafe mode where the middleman server wasn't doing any passing at all.

Make it speak English!

crazylegs — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:35:47 -0800

Just downloaded Play65 but it isn't in English! Help! I want to play backgammon online for money. I just downloaded some online backgammon software called 'Play65'. When I open it on my computer it is written in a language I don't recognize, possibly Hebrew? How do I make it into English?

I can't go on. I'll go on.

cascando — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:00:04 -0800

Beckett translation needed badly, please. En Francais. Please look up, or translate the last couple lines of The Unnameable ( L'Innommable ) for me. In English, it works out to: "I can't go on. I'll go on." What is the French? If you have a French copy in front of you, could you please add the punctuation and structure as it is written. Maybe the last few lines of the book ? Sorry, looked everywhere, couldn't find online or in the local library. Need this information very badly, thank you.

Creating a Subtitled DVD

Silky Slim — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:09:43 -0800

I need some help with creating a DVD with subtitles. My computer is a Mac, but also runs Parallels and XP. I'm adept at using Subtitle Workshop (under Windows) to create .srt files. I have also used .srt files with Submerge on the Mac to create Quicktime movies with hardcoded subs.
Right now, I'd like to create subs in Subtitle Workshop and use them to create a subtitled DVD that can be played anywhere (hopefully not hardcoded subs).
It dawned on me that I have no idea how to do this.
I noticed SW can export subs in .sub format. That's a good thing, right?
I only have iDVD right now. Do I need to get DVD Studio Pro for this? Maybe this could be achieved using Toast?
Thanks a lot in advance for any assistance. I'd like to do this on the Mac if possible, but Windows solutions are also OK.

Spanish translation

nextian_geometry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:33:49 -0800

Asking for a friend who bought a shirt in Spain which reads "Por crisis alquilo 50% de mi cama". Can anyone translate? Already tried babelfish etc without any success..

Get that Chinese out of there!

saysthis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:10:05 -0800

I'd like to find, or build, a tool for stripping differently encoded text from bilingual (Chinese/English) text documents. Bonus - since this is for subtitles, I need to be able to train it to recognize timecodes and unique characters like returns and hyphens. Double bonus - I know jack about programming, but since the only way to do this right now I have is by hand, which costs me hours and hours of tedium and is putting me at risk for carpal tunnel, I'm definitely willing to put in the time to learn. I'm a subtitle translator, and because of the nature of movie production, where they rarely have a final cut even after I'm done translating and timing the movie, I usually need to make a "master" subtitle file for editing purposes. That is, a subtitle file with both languages, one of which then usually needs to be removed so I can burn a review DVD for the technically inept director or whoever's in charge of making final decisions on the subtitles.

That means that, at the moment, I have to go line by line and delete all the English or Chinese from the file. For a typical movie, with 1000+ lines of dialogue, that's two hours if I'm feeling self-destructive, and my wrists HURT afterward. Not to mention it just zones me out, and I'm usually exhausted after that kind of repetition. It's the kind of work that can destroy a day's productivity, and I usually have to do that 4-5 times per movie. (I know you'll suggest just doing it once and then editing the English, but these people sometimes add/change/remove 2-300 lines of dialogue per edit. I need to be able to look at the source language as I do it, and they, being movie people, provide zero documentation; gotta work from the master sub file or I waste even more time.)

There has got to be a better way, and I'm pretty sure that given the fact that I'm working with two differently encoded languages, it shouldn't be too terribly impossible, right? I'm imagining a tool where I can tell it "take anything that looks like GBK/BIG5 and remove it." Or the same with ASCII. Now, the trick is, it would need to be trainable to recognize and ignore the particular ASCII patterns that subtitle files use for timecodes, returns, font details, and other metadata in the subs.

If it doesn't exist, as God as my witness, I will build it! It seems simple enough. I know absolutely nothing about programming except general principles, but I know that building a tool that can work with text in .txt documents. Some encoding interfaces with the character databases in whatever OS you're using, some wildcard fields for patterns to ignore, and profile memory for different subtitle formats. This is the thing I need.

If this tool doesn't exist yet, what do I need to know to build it? Is there a software language I should focus on? How can I keep this lightweight and distribute it freely once I've got it? Does sourceforge have some sort of development platform for stuff like this?

Amo Amas Awhat?

The Whelk — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:23:36 -0800

Is there a Medieval Linguist in the house? I need a very short conversation between Cistercian nuns in Saxony translated into Medieval Latin. Any help so I don't sound like a complete idiot warmly welcomed. Background, it's 1301 in Lower Saxony at Wienhausen Abbey

"He wishes in all humbleness to adore the relic."

"Impossible."

"But abbess, he has brought a wonder! He says it is a gift. He only wants a moment with it."

"Bring him to me."

Total Side Question: I can't figure out if the nuns wouldn't used Old German or Latin when speaking to each other rather than writing religious texts. Some sources say Old French, even.

Quoting Proust

1f2frfbf — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:37:03 -0800

Looking for a Marcel Proust quote in the original French. “Love is space and time directly perceptible to the heart” is what my copy of Auden's Book of Aphorisms says, but I want to know know what Proust originally wrote. Googling around I can find that it's from The Captive (La Prisonnière), and I can do a machine translation, but I'd rather know the original French.

What would you call it?

Chrischris — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:00:33 -0800

emergency translation alert: What phrase would a Latin American Spanish speaker use to describe the following piece of closet hardware: Extending hang rod.

Picture a rod assembly which is attached to a closet or cabinet and slides out to hold clothes hangers, but slides back in an out of sight when not in use. I've been tasked with finding out what a Spanish speaker might plausibly call such a thing, and am leery of the online translation sites, which have burned me by returning inappropriate or overly-literal phrases before...

"Twin" Translation

madmamasmith — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:28:47 -0800

I am looking for translations for the words "twin" and "sister". I have used babelfish and other sites but really want the pronunciation not just foreign writings I can't decipher. Also, translations in other languages not listed such as different Native American tribal translations. Help?!

¡Ayúdame, por favor!

twistofrhyme — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:19:31 -0800

Spanish filter: please translate this short paragraph. My Spanish grammar is a little rusty so I'm seeking some advice on how to properly translate something I'm working on. I'd like this to sound like a voiceover for a family-friendly documentary, along the lines of March of the Penguins. And I would prefer a dialect of Spanish that doesn't point specifically to any particular region, as much as that's possible. Here's the text I need:

"And so, as you will see if you look very closely, some objects are very smooth, while others are quite bumpy or rough to the touch. These differences in texture are much more apparent when magnified, than when viewed by the naked eye."

¡Gracias, colmena!

It's a small world

woodway — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:36:26 -0800

Automatic language translators: which is the best, for now? What efforts are underway to improve them? How much progress have we seen, on what sort of time scale? My interest pertains to Latin script languages, but I'm curious about the matter generally.

Dutch -> English

shino-boy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:52:54 -0800

This proverb has me stumpified... I recently came across this proverb, attributed to the Dutch:

"Those who dislike cats will be carried to the cemetery in the rain."

I think it's kind of awesome, I just can't figure out what it might mean in American English. Anyone know how it might translate?

Polish Translation for "I have nothing"?

rickim — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:57:20 -0800

Polish translation for "I have nothing"? At a recent family event my uncle told me my grandfather used to say something along the lines of "E monYETS" meaning "I have nothing" or "I am poor" in Polish. My google-fu has failed me, is this a common phrase? Does someone have the correct spelling in Polish?

Thai-to-English Translation Sought for Butthole Surfers Fan

not_on_display — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:27:52 -0800

Do you speak Thai? Can you translate this song into English?* This mp3 link is performed by the original artist, who remains unknown, and was infamously plundered by the Butthole Surfers in 1987 to create the track "Kuntz" on the album Locust Abortion Technician. Purpose: I would like to do an English-version cover of the original song. Plus, it's a good li'l mystery -- an unknown artist, and the only lyrics translated so far are vaguely about the "itch" that "won't go away....the itch never leaves."*

* [.mp3 file and quote via WFMU's Beware of the Blog]

What’s “Peanut Butter Cups” in French?

hydrophonic — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:00:52 -0800

How would I write “Peanut Butter Cups” in French? Help me win the Bake Off at work! It’s the candy bar challenge, where the challenge is to use candy as an ingredient or inspiration. I made my own version of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups last night, using ganache. I want to prepare my title card in French. I figure a little marketing can’t hurt.

Translate the Razzleberry Jam?

slowcat — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:05:08 -0800

Can someone translate the Japanese in this song for me: The Razzleberry Jam, the theme song of the Razzleberry frozen yogurt franchise in Tokyo. If you don't already have it, you can download it here: http://razzleberry.jp/ Under Special Download near the bottom. Thanks!

Dutch name translation

eaglehound — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:13:09 -0800

I have found a written reference to a person with a last name of: ten Thije ook genoemd Boonkkamp. I am assuming that it is Dutch? and can anyone transliterate it into English, especially the non-capitalized parts? Does it mean 'Thije' who is married to 'Boonkkamp' or anything like that?