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Jan. 8th, 2013 10:35 am
Curtha i bhfolach i radharc soiléir
When I first started posting here, it used to be a fairly safe assumption that if I wrote something in a foreign language, only speakers of that language would understand it. Then a regular reader surprised me by replying in English to a side discussion I was having in German, demonstrating just how useful Google Translate could be for getting the gist of a conversation. Now I've gotten in the habit of running foreign texts through it to get some idea what a chunk of my readership will actually be taking away from the exchange.
In this way, I've come to learn that, although GT can be surprisingly accurate at times, its usefulness drops off precipitously when you move away from the major European languages. Register is also an issue since most of the texts it digests are bureaucratic. Start dropping in colloquialisms and nonstandard spellings and it will quickly go off the rails, even in German or French. If I combine both deviations and write in a full-on dialectal form of a less common language, I'm back to effectively hiding my posting in plain view again.
Today I came across a particularly brilliant example. Droim láimhe a thabhairt do is an Irish idiom meaning "ignore" or "reject" which literally translates as "giving the back of the hand to". Standard Irish droim "back" is historically a dative form now used in all cases except genitive. (This has happened with a number of feminine second declension nouns ending a broad consonant in the casus rectus. Slender final consonants are characteristic of feminine gender, so generalising the dative of these nouns makes their grammatical gender more salient.) Munster Irish is more conservative than Connacht (and, thus, Standard Irish) in this instance and preserves the older nominative/accusative form drom. It wouldn't provoke an eyeblink from a competent speaker of Irish, but using it in place of droim completely spoofs GT. Ná tabhair droim láimhe di gets translated quite accurately as "Do not ignore her"[*]. But Ná tabhair drom láimhe di is inexplicably "Do not give her hand chalets." Sáréifeacht!
[*] Though, oddly, if you leave the accent off of láimhe "hand" (gen.), the translation shifts to "Do not ignore it".
In this way, I've come to learn that, although GT can be surprisingly accurate at times, its usefulness drops off precipitously when you move away from the major European languages. Register is also an issue since most of the texts it digests are bureaucratic. Start dropping in colloquialisms and nonstandard spellings and it will quickly go off the rails, even in German or French. If I combine both deviations and write in a full-on dialectal form of a less common language, I'm back to effectively hiding my posting in plain view again.
Today I came across a particularly brilliant example. Droim láimhe a thabhairt do is an Irish idiom meaning "ignore" or "reject" which literally translates as "giving the back of the hand to". Standard Irish droim "back" is historically a dative form now used in all cases except genitive. (This has happened with a number of feminine second declension nouns ending a broad consonant in the casus rectus. Slender final consonants are characteristic of feminine gender, so generalising the dative of these nouns makes their grammatical gender more salient.) Munster Irish is more conservative than Connacht (and, thus, Standard Irish) in this instance and preserves the older nominative/accusative form drom. It wouldn't provoke an eyeblink from a competent speaker of Irish, but using it in place of droim completely spoofs GT. Ná tabhair droim láimhe di gets translated quite accurately as "Do not ignore her"[*]. But Ná tabhair drom láimhe di is inexplicably "Do not give her hand chalets." Sáréifeacht!
[*] Though, oddly, if you leave the accent off of láimhe "hand" (gen.), the translation shifts to "Do not ignore it".
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