27th January 2002 - Updated 03th March 2011

Information for Ade and Cockney Dave as to why an electronic language translator is not the perfect solution to catching up with foreign lingo

• If you want to translate a noun then that's fair enough
• If you want to translate an adjective that's also fair enough
• Verbs are a bit of a sticky pancake but possible in the infinitive
• The way you actually pronounce the words is very important and the only way to do this is to spend a few years learning the language in question

Traditional Metaphors, sayings and mottos
Conversational language is peppered with little sayings, and often they are so abstract that a direct translation is useless.
E.G.
Out of the frying pan into the fire. - Which can mean " You are making things worse for yourself " or " things are going to get worse ".(depending upon what context it is used)
A rolling stone gathers no moss - which means " it's better to do something than to do nothing ".

Sometimes these sentences are the same in many languages, but mostly they are not. Consider this box.
 

English Version	Literal Meaning	Spanish Version
Going to powder my nose                   -or- Spending a penny, see a man about a dog/horse etc	Going to the Lavatory	To Go where the king goes alone
What's that got to do with the price of fish?	So what ?	I have an aunt who plays the guitar
Money to burn	One who wastes money	To have more wool than a lamb
To bite off more than you can chew	Don't start something you can't finish	Enter on horseback, leave on a donkey
Look Before You Leap	Be Cautious	Before you marry, look at what you do
Pull the other one	You are teasing me	To another dog with that bone

Because metaphors and sayings are traditional, popular and nonsence, you have to be aware of them, and even recognise half of them e.g. Out of the frying pan which would be totally confusing to an occasional english speaker or translation device.

Formal / Familiar
We are taught at school how in French and other languages they have two modes of addressing people. Formal and Familiar. This seems very strange at first, but it was exactly the same in English a Century ago.
As well as You there was also ThouTheeThy and Thine. These are simply familiar versions of You Your You all and Yours. Up north where we live, people often say thee and thar, so much so that people in Chesterfield, down the road in Derbyshire, call us Yorkshiremen Dee Daas, because thee and thar sound like Dee and Dar. In Derbyshire they use Yourn for you all and in South Yorkshire we use Yore

Familiar speech is not such an alien concept to us anyway. People often tag on an affectionate word to the end of a request or statement anyway. Such as Dear, Love, Duck, Sweetie, Mate, Honey etc.. This is just the same as what the foreigners do, but we often don't realise that we do it ourselves.
 

I Can I Can't
The other problem with modern languages [other than English], is that the sentence construction is more like 15th and 16th century English,

so if you said in english Where are you going? You would have to translate to other languages where goest  you

and only in modern English do we use Can and Can't all the time.

In english you would say I can't hear what you're saying Charles but you would have to translate No hearest I what thou sayest Charles

Reflexive

Also, things that you can do to yourself, like Wash, Get Up, Sit down
In latin languages are used in a more old fashioned form.

eg.
to have a wash becomes to wash oneself
To get up in the morning becomes to raise oneself up