vijayjohn wrote:So what I did was to translate it more or less as follows: "If the watermelon ends up growing quickly and first, as for the basil (கரந்தையோ), it will similarly have to sprout immediately." (கரந்தையோ is pronounced something like [kaɾan̪d̪ajˈjoː]).
கரந்தை ([kaˈɾan̪d̪aj]?) means 'basil', and -யோ [joː] is normally an interrogative suffix of some sort, I think (in Malayalam, it is the only one we have), but it can also be used to emphasize an argument in a sentence (not sure whether this would be topicalization or focus), which is why I picked it. Of course, there was no way for dEhiN to actually know any of this, and the translation was already difficult and convoluted enough as it was, so understandably, he just ignored it.
I knew that கரந்தை meant basil (well, it was one of the many new Tamil words I looked up and learned!). I also knew that the -யோ suffix was used for emphasis of sorts in Tamil, but I couldn't put it all together to mean "as for the basil". So I was just confused on where the basil fit in, and thus ignored it.
Luís wrote:Btw, à sua volta doesn't mean in its turn but rather around it.
I'm assuming the it in this case refers to the watermelon? That's how I read the French
autour d'elle.
vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:I know that gemma can mean "bud" but that's not the central meaning. Moreover, given the surrounding terminology, I thought Mencius launched into his horticultural metaphor halfway through the paragraph and not from the beginning. I never would have thought of using it as a translation of capullo but, then again, I never would've used capullo in that context anyway. (Now I'm curious what the Tamil equivalent was.)
The Tamil equivalent was மொட்டு; in Malayalam at least, we pronounce this [mɔˈʈɯ]. It means 'bud', but apparently, in Malayalam, it can also mean 'nipple', and in Tamil, it can also mean 'glans penis', which might be how it ended up being
capullo in Spanish!
I knew the word meant was bud. Wordreference gives both
botón and
capullo as translations for bud in the sense of unopened flower, with
capullo listed first, so I picked the first one. I didn't know about the slang meaning of மொட்டு. Linguoboy, what context would you use
capullo in normally?
Also, if anyone is willing to help me, I would love to go over my Spanish translation in more detail in order to improve my Spanish. I believe I have a Spanish thread that we could move the discussion to.