Naava wrote:Linguaphile wrote:Original: *.. kupja vetruva pihlakase kepi nähvak tõi poolsurnule hinge sisse .. E. Särgava.
I decided to try and see if the meaning of this sentence had changed since the last time. And yes, yes it had! Here's what it means now:
Estonian -> Finnish:
Möykkyisen kevätmarjan purema toi puolikuolleen hengityksen.The bite of a lumpy springberry brought with it the breath of a/the half-dead [person].
Estonian -> English:
The bite of a sticky springberry brought a half-dead breath....at least the Finnish translation doesn't have English in it anymore. That counts as an improvement, right?
// Edit: I noticed Google translate tried to correct my spelling and write poolsurnule as pool surnule. If I let it separate the words, the translation changes:
Estonian -> Finnish:
Tahmean kevätmarjan purema toi puolet kuolleista sieluun.The bite of a sticky springberry brought half of the dead into the soul.
// Edit #2: I wrote this post on my phone, which made me curious to see if I'd get a different translation on my laptop. Lo and behold...
Estonian -> Finnish (laptop)
tahmean kevätmarjan paskiainen toi puolikuolleen hengityksenthe bastard of a sticky springberry brought the breath of a/the half-dead [person]
And if written as
pool surnule:
tahmean kevätmarjan pamaus toi puolet kuolleiden sielustathe bang of a sticky springberry brought half of the soul of [each] dead [person]
I'm wondering about that springberry, though. At first I thought maybe "springberry" was an alternate name for "rowan". But actually I think it's getting the "spring" part from
vetruva and the "berry" part maybe from
pihlakase since rowans have berry-like fruits, and deciding to put them together for our entertainment.
In the thread in the "what made you laugh" thread I posted this, which I thought I'd posted here before in some form but can't find already so I'll post it again in this forum, too:
In Estonian there is a rather well-known poorly-Google-translated Navy song for which we have historical data.
Here is the song (I'm just posting the refrain because that's the only part for which there is that "historical data"):
Original:
Jää vabaks, Eesti meri,
jää vabaks, Eesti pind!
Siis tuisku ega tormi
ei karda Eesti rind.
Actual meaning (me):
► Show Spoiler
Stay free, Estonian sea,
stay free, Estonian land!
Then come blizzard or storm
Estonia will not fear.
Google's translation in March of 2009 went viral:
Google tried to fix it. By December of 2009 had been "improved" to this:
► Show Spoiler
Free of ice, the sea of Estonia,
free of ice, the surface of Estonia!
Then the storm whirls, or
Estonia is not afraid of boobs.
February 2010, still trying...
► Show Spoiler
The ice-free, the Estonian sea
The ice-free, surface-Estonian!
Then a storm whirls, or
Estonia is not afraid of boobs.
November 2010:
► Show Spoiler
The ice-free sea of Estonia,
ice-free area in Estonia!
Then a storm whirls, or
Estonia is not afraid of boobs.
The ice and the boobs didn't disappear until sometime around May 2015:
► Show Spoiler
Stay free, Estonian sea,
Stay free, Estonian turf!
Then the storm whirls or
Estonia is not afraid.
Current translation from Google (March 2022):
► Show Spoiler
Stay free Estonian sea,
stay free, Estonian surface!
Then a blizzard or a storm
Estonia is not afraid.
This also led to this discussion (below) about "Eesti rind"; does anyone have any thoughts on how it should be translated? I could not find any genuine English translation for this song, everything just references the google ones, and some sources online identify the current one as "correct". It's close, but I wonder if by saying it's correct it's more like saying "Okay Google, you can stop messing with it now, please just leave it alone before you make it worse again".
Linguaphile wrote:dEhiN wrote:Why the mix up between ice and stay, and blizzard and boobs? Are those pairs of homonyms?
"Ice" and "stay" are homonyms (
jää as a noun means "ice", and as a verb form means "stay" or "remain").
"Blizzard" is
tuisk(u) and doesn't have another meaning, but the issue causing the problem is the word
rind at the very end, which means "front, bosom, breast, chest" (etc), including things like military or political fronts (and boobs, but it's not slang). So "Eesti rind" means "Estonian front", but here it just refers to something along the lines of facing the storms or maybe the military sense since it's a military song. It could have been left out if it were not for the desire to rhyme with
pind, so I felt it works better untranslated (i.e., translated just as "Estonia"). I can see why Google had trouble; I debated myself whether to translate it as "the Estonian front will have no fear" or "Estonia will not face [a blizzard or storm] with fear" or just "Estonia will not fear".