looduskalender.ee

Better be languageless or speechless?

Not how, but why ...?

... is 13 items a "devil's dozen", kuraditosin, in Estonian?
(Black stork Tiina waited for a kuraditosin of days for Tiit, http://www.looduskalender.ee/node/12931)

You get one item extra, nicely and generously, so the English "baker's dozen" is logical - a baker might have or even give you an extra bun.
Although waiting for an extra day may not have been so pleasant.

I think the baker's dozen was a defense against the accusation of not giving enough (I think it was a criminal offense in Britain in the very olden days), maybe in Estonia the name is from the point of view of the baker being forced to give extra to protect themselves. Or one to give to the devil to keep him away (there are so many fun possibilities).

Should we rename this topic "How does Google Translator say ...?"

GT on the ERR cameras interview ("Looduskalender in the media" topic) was actually a positive surprise: editing was mostly rehash and rearranging of words and sentence bits - true, thorough re-design - but the words by themselves were quite usable .

Lately GT has managed both the citrine wagtail (kuldhänilane), the yellow wagtail (hänilane) and gully or gulch - well, it didn't translate but explained, for "sälkorg", V-shaped valley.

(But a boss once said that he much preferred dependably sub-standard people to unpredictable flashes of cleverness ...)

good idea, let's collect what strange things one encounters - the other day I had a neopren suit in one of my translations!

The best GT ideas I ever had were in an article on the horse chestnut leaf-miner [Cameraria ohridella] from the Royal Horticultural Society.

The little beast became a "kleines Blattbergmann" in German and the caterpillar was a "Gleiskettenfahrzeug".

GT always prefers the technical variety of the aquivilants, so nearly every translation of non-technical articles is really curious.

The wetsuit I found in the Birder http://www.looduskalender.ee/en/node/12940:



Do you find a wetsuit (Neoprenanzug) in this sentence?
GT said: ... "aber wir konnten niemanden finden, der Neoprenanzug unter den anderen" - we could find nobody, the wetsuit among the others.
The last sentence has also its charm: "Mit diesem Tool trennten wir uns in den Hafen." - with this "tool" we parted into the harbour. I didn't find a tool anywhere and I don't know a German word tool. Maybe the wetsuit was meant?

In the article about the track hunting: http://www.looduskalender.ee/en/node/12977


GT said: ... und schrubbte den Kofferraum mit dem Genick ... - and scrubbed the trunk (but the one in the car!) with the neck.

Unfortunately the other funny one I have not noted down. But sometimes I really shake my head!

About the wetsuit - no idea what set GT off on those tracks. When I tested it behaved quite nicely and produced rather reasonable translations. I started with the Neoprene core bit, and gradually increased the text to be translated sentence by sentence, Estonian/German as well as English/German.
Sometimes very insignificant details can set the computers hunting in altogether wrong areas. Might be too that they just then had had a load of diving literature. Or, well, some exotic behaviour descriptions?
That ill-famed "Hang Estonia's sons" etc turned out - for me at least - to be triggered off by capital K in Kaunistagem (= adorn); lower-case k - much less bloodthirsty version.

If I try that sentence now, it gives a somewhat correct translation, no more neoprene. I copied that sentence because I found it so strange, maybe somewhere somebody just translated some diving literature? It is like you say, sometimes it's almost correct, needs a bit of adjustment in the positioning of the words, and sometimes you don't recognise your original sentence!

The answer to the mystery of the lost neoprene suit may be something to do us a little proud: Google Translator is supposed to learn from new texts all the time. It just may have found and processed our published translations, and now uses bits and pieces from them.

Nowadays for instance it sometimes proposes Potterer for Tiit Kändler's Õueonu, a translation that was definitely invented here on the forum.

But again, Google translations quite as plain Googling are very much a matter of statistics. Use same search terms in Google on two different days, no guarantee that the same hit list turns up.

That's right, and that's what makes it difficult. And I admit, if I find something too far off, I'll use the function to change it!

Harbours and harbors ...
Had to check the official name of Tallinn's newest museum offering, the Lennusadam, part of the Estonian Maritime Museum. In museum's main menu header: Harbor.

Ouuuu .... .....
Another elk/moose, s/z etc hazy divide between old European and fresh US English?

However, it is 50-50 harbour/harbor in the museum site texts and the Seaplane Harbour's own site says 100% harbOUr
Read about the Seaplane Harbour, with a u, at http://www.lennusadam.eu/en/
Guided tours: "...the tour ship dives into the murky depths of the origins of Finno-Ugric culture, drifting through the centuries on the stormy Baltic Sea, and finally emerging in the middle of the last century ..."

Harbour, honour, colour -- Canada and Great Britain
harbor, honor, color -- the US

I got my hand thwacked when I lived in Victoria, so I learned to use the "u". For years I spelled them with a "u" when writing by hand and yet was likely to type them without, but then I read so many books published in England and began chatting with several Canadians online and now I typically type them with a 'u" as well.

I think it is OK to use the British spelling-- most of us Americans who read (a diminishing number, I fear . . .) understand quite well what is meant. After all, we love the language used on Downton Abbey & Sherlock!

But "arbor" is just arbor. Whereas ardour is US ardor. No simple rules.

Two similar languages are always the most difficult to learn and go on keeping apart.

Changing between them must probably be a procedure like slamming a door or closing a drawer - firmly - and opening the other.

My trouble is that British English is what I learnt and what I try to keep to. But with the enormous influx of Internet texts, most often in US or undefined "Englishes", including our own European Utility EU English (EUEUE, indeed) it is increasingly difficult to be sure of which is what in my memory, with too little reinforcement from reading well written texts in definitely one language or the other (lack of time, maybe lack of tempting books ...)

Oh well, King Canute sat on the shore and willed the tidewater to recede. And got his feet wet. However, he is said to have taken it in a very Christian and humble spirit.

Oh dear Liis I am sure I try to spell arbor -- arbour.

But as Kitty says just stick with the British -- to the best of your ability.

Well, I will do my humble poor best.

Meanwhile:
Can seeds from a garden cultivar of apple produce feral apple trees, languagewise?
About things gone wild - it goes against the grain to write that an apple tree is feral. Feral cats are OK, feral plants - no. However, I suspect I might be unduly influenced by "ferocious".

Is the red-footed falcon truly and only red-footed or actually red-legged? (Yes, the official bird name list says red-footed but I still wonder)

The crab apple http://www.looduskalender.ee/node/13612
The red-footed falcon http://www.looduskalender.ee/node/13613

I am with you on the feral point, gone wild seems comfortable. I think there might be an official term, but...


Most cultivated apples are grown on a different varieties root stock so I don't know much about apple trees just grown from seed.

Seedlings from domestic (or whatever they are) apples:
they are never copies of parent trees quite as humans never are of parents.
However, some sowings can be resounding successes: those famous - possibly mythical? - 7 seeds from a Ribston apple that Mr Cox sowed whereupon Cox Orange and Cox Pomona eventually turned up, for instance.

So what actually is wild, feral or a new cultivar is an open issue . But they won't be proper crab apples.
Don't know if the rootstocks are "wild" either - after all they are very specific and named varieties these days.

God created, man classified, then God, or nature, created some more ...

There is a heart-rending passage in a Swedish literature classic, Unto a good land by Vilhelm Moberg (about the Swedish emigration to USA in the 19th century) where farmer's wife Kristina carries with her seeds of her homestead apples - astrakhan apple it was - and tear-eyed, eventually takes the first bite in the foreign land of her homeland. No way, hard-hearted geneticists growled right from the start.

I had to pull out my huge Oxford English Dictionary to learn about feral

On the way to it, I came across Feracious - Bearing abundantly; fruitful.
Feracity - The qualilty of being feracious. Finally, there is feral - pertaining to funeral rights or to the dead. Deadly. Fatal. Funereal. Gloomy.
Feral diseases - Birds that love Darknesse GAUDEN

Feral - Wild, untamed, uncultivated. Often of animals and plants that have run wild.
Of, pertaining to or resembling a wild beast; brutal, savage.

So it seems that a plant or tree can be feral! It is certainly not a common usage but education is wonderful