Hot answers tagged translation
181
Speaking as a translator, I can share a few rules of thumb that are popular in our profession:
Hebrew texts are usually shorter than their English equivalents by approximately 1/3.
Spanish and Portuguese texts are longer than their English counterparts by about 1/5 to 1/4.
Scandinavian languages are pretty much on par with English. Swedish is a tiny bit ...
36
A point of reference from the website I maintain. The files where we store the translations have the following sizes:
English: 200k
Portuguese: 208k
Spanish: 209k
German: 219k
And the translations are out of date, that is, there are strings in the English file that aren't yet in the other files.
For Chinese, the situation is a bit different because ...
30
The term penny-wise refers to being "careful in dealing with small sums of money or small matters". It's commonly found in the phrase penny wise, pound foolish, meaning "Someone who is penny wise, pound foolish can be very careful or mean with small amounts of money, yet wasteful and extravagant with large sums."
You may also find the term bikeshedding of ...
30
For a car or a train, if you stop using the engine to propel it, you can say that you coast to a stop, or that the train (or car) is coasting. I haven't heard this used for boats (and Googling seems to indicate that if you coast in a boat, it often means that you are following the coastline), but I don't know what term would be used instead.
UPDATE: As ...
28
Overkill is originally a military analysis term from the Cold War, referring to the fact that the belligerents each had far more nuclear weapons than they would need to completely destroy the other. These days it's generally used metaphorically to mean precisely the sort of excessive effort or excessive means you talk of.
Bring a gun to a knife-fight is ...
24
In first-person conversation, I would generally say something like "I'll cover this one, you can get the next" or "I've got this, you can owe me." Or, going the other way, "If you could take this, I'll pick up the next one."
As @Jim mentions in a comment, "fronting" is a good term too. "Bob fronted Mary a twenty so she could pick up the new release while ...
24
There are two possible interpretations of your question, and they're giving rise to two different kinds of answers which mean different things.
If by "pay back" you mean the person will return the specific amount of money to you in the near future, common words (at least in my experience, in US English) would be "fronting" the money or "spotting" the money. ...
24
Try this:
The straw that broke the camel’s back.
This write-up traces the saying’s history back to long ago, noting that Seneca once wrote in “On Despising Death” (Letter XXIV):
Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the ...
22
Besides Cool's good suggestion of
• slapdash (“Done hastily; haphazard; careless”, but I'd substitute not careful in place of careless)
and suggestion of
• slipshod (“Done poorly or too quickly; slapdash”, but I'd say slipshod work is lower in quality than slapdash work),
and the suggestions in comments of
• hack (“An expedient, temporary solution, ...
20
Well, obviously you can't translate many things literally, as you would constantly end up with sentences such as "it gave it to it" in English, where in the source language with genders you have a perfectly clear "she gave it to him".
However, there are usually easy ways around this, the most obvious one being: kick out the pronouns and replace them with ...
16
One idiomatic way to refer to a measure that doesn't make much difference would be a drop in the bucket or a drop in the ocean.
drop in the bucket
(idiomatic) An effort or action having very little overall influence, especially as compared to a huge problem.
A $100 donation from an individual is generous, but it is a drop in the bucket compared ...
16
I think the word you are looking for here is momentum, as in traveling on momentum alone.
momentum n
2. (Physics / General Physics) the impetus of a body resulting from its motion
15
Two idioms would be:
To crack a nut with a sledgehammer.
To break a (butter)fly on the wheel.
The wheel in question being a device for capital punishment of humans. So using it on a tiny fly would, quite literally, be overkill and it is also not clear if you would actually hit the fly at all or if it would be able to get away swiftly — a ...
14
Shakespeare is considered Modern English, and is almost never rendered in contemporary English. It is usually edited for spelling and other reasons, however, depending on your edition.
There is no "freshness date" that triggers a translation, though. It depends in large part on which version of English is being cited. Much of Middle English (e.g., Chaucer) ...
14
Pioneer (often seen in adjectival form, as in "a pioneering scientist") is a reasonably close match.
But I doubt you'll find an exact analogue. A pioneer or a trailblazer does something first, and a visionary thinks something first, but I don't think we have a common word for someone who thinks and does something first, or someone who does something ...
14
First, I don't think you're actually looking for a gerund. In English, a gerund refers to using a verb as a noun, and since you don't have another conjugated verb in the last phrase, I think you're actually looking for a participle (and wikipedia tells me in Portuguese, gerúndio refers to an adverbial participle, so that makes sense)
Now, as DeepYellow ...
14
A corresponding conversation in English might go something like this:
― You should get yourself a girlfriend!
― A girlfriend? What’s that?!
It’s more sarcasm than irony, and the reply is often “deadpanned”.
12
There's a joke in French that it's pretty much impossible to translate into English because of this problem:
So one guy says to another "Regard, le mouche". The other guy replies "C'est la mouche". The first guy turns, impressed: "You've got good eyes."
OK. It's not a great loss to the English language, but still...
12
I'm not sure it fits exactly, but there is a phrase with similar intent in the medical profession: "life over limb". It directly mirrors your gangrene example because you might have to sacrifice part of a healthy limb to save the patient's life.
It is sometimes used beyond the literal meaning as well. For instance, moving a patient with a suspected ...
12
In English, you walk big heavy objects when you move them in this way. From thefreedictionary...
v. tr. 6: To move (a heavy or cumbersome object) in a manner suggestive of walking.
(but you might have to inch it round a tight corner verb: to move by inches or small degrees)
12
Western society does not have explicit castes, and even notional/nominal class is tied now more to education and profession than to birth. In fact, it is more than a little bit politically incorrect to talk about these things, because it condemns people for things beyond their own control.
If you are talking about somebody who’s nobody special, you might ...
11
This is of course a big generalisation. I would say it differently: Supporting multiple languages can break the user interface, because for almost any language there will be a string that needs more space than English.
What I mean is, "the average world length" may be close to English, but some particular words/expressions might be surprisingly long when ...
11
According to Wikipedia’s entries for Public toilet and Bathroom, the British term for a room containing a bath is a bathroom and the term for a room containing a toilet is a toilet.
If these are accurate, it would make sense to translate:
sovmeshchonny sanuzel ➡ combined bathroom and toilet
razdelny sanuzel ➡ separate bathroom and toilet
11
As RegDwight says, drop in the bucket (American), and drop in the ocean (British) are commonly used, but they both often carry the implication that some minor "positive" contribution will have no detectable effect on the overall situation.
It's declined a bit from its heyday around WW2, but don't spoil the ship for a hap'orth of tar is a well-established ...
10
Just translate the terms 'Play Now", 'Instant Play', 'Visit Site' or even 'Click Here' - all common call to actions on the web, and see the results. some are much shorter and some are much much longer.
I am responsible for a large portfolio of multi language sites with some carrying 29 languages and although mostly the design side runs smoothly, there are ...
10
duration or period
The duration between building maintenance dates is about ten days.
or
The period between building maintenance dates is about ten days.
Alternatives include:
time
time span
interval
term
spell
interim
tide
space
stretch
spread
gap
interlude
opening
pause
10
Actually number of samples does have a unit, i.e. samples. So you could say:
I have 101 samples
Just as you can say
I ran 100 km.
So if you are counting something, e.g. samples, apples, people, etc., then use that as the unit.
A quantity without a unit is often a ratio, e.g. a ratio of length (metres) to width (metres) would have no units ...
10
It is common to use the phrase 'doors and windows' as a class of objects that is part of a construction (typically part of what is known as joinery and woodwork). This suggests that there is no widely used and understood single word for this purpose.
In certain technical contexts, doors, windows, ventilators, etc., are collectively referred to as ...
10
There is an expression
won't amount to a hill of beans
(sometimes also phrased as won't add up to a hill of beans)
Since beans are so inexpensive, even a hill of them won't be worth much.
As an example:
All our efforts won't amount to a hill of beans if we can't get that valve closed.
10
Another idiomatic option (at least in British English) would be:
You should get yourself a girlfriend.
Sorry, never heard of it.
The use of the impersonal pronoun "it" is part of the humour; it indicates that the speaker not only has no girlfriend, but doesn't even understand the concept that a "girlfriend" might be a type of human being.
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