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Member
Picture of BobHale
posted
Because I was feeling lazy this morning I used Google Translate to translate a short poem in German that I came across on another site. One of the lines in the middle was

"das Leben bewegt sich nicht zurück, jemals"

which I would translate as, "life doesn't move backwards, ever" or maybe,just because it sounds better in English "life never moves backwards"

Google Translate messed up the negation and rendered it as

"life moves back, do not ever" so that the negation then attached itself to the next line.

Doesn't that sort of reverse the meaning?


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
 
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Picture of Kalleh
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It seems to me to reverse the meaning.

As an aside, I like the first translation ("life doesn't move backwards, ever") better than the one you liked better ("life never moves backwards). It seems so much more definite. It would be like saying, "I'll not marry you, ever!" versus, "I'll never marry you!" I'd see the second person perhaps changing his mind; not the first.
 
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