Did you ever meet the IDS Project? I did recently. It’s interesting, but… there’s only one language I know well enough to meo,* and it’s absolutely not right. What it calls Standard Hungarian is not standard and never was. It’s using letter y for [j], what was really used some five centuries ago, but the whole orthography was different. Talay, tayték, yég, ifyú, these are looking ridiculous. Also, it uses cz for [ʧ], what was in use several centuries ago, too, but later it was applied for [ʦ] and finally went out from use. Czendes, moczár, czillag, czeczemő… nonsense. If two identical vowels meet in a compound word, it takes them together as a long one. Fányag, that’s written there, but no Hungarian will recognize that. Faanyag. Fa (wooden) + anyag (material) = faanyag. And it’s pronounced [fɒ.ɒɲɒg], not [fa:ɲɒg], as the written form suggests. Similarly, mostohápa instead of mostohaapa etc. Asszony is written aszszony in all of its components. That won’t work, the long consonant is szsz only when hyphenated at the end of the line. Normally, it’s ssz. This way oposszum became oposzszum, too, and so on. When these two meet, the result is totally distorted: visszaad → viszszád. There are many typos, too: sikság instead of síkság, földnelv (földnyelv), folyo (folyó), sötégség (sötétség), kagyuló (kagyló), légelzik (lélegzik), légezés (lélegzés), císít (visít) etc. And there are wrong translations. Forgatag doesn’t mean whirlpool, at least not when the word is among several water related words. Forgatag means a whirl, a large crowd of people continuously walking around (on a populated marketplace, for example), but it’s rarely used for a whirlpool on water. That’s called örvény. A vulture is a bird, but the translation given, dögevő, is not a bird. It means carcass eater, and can be applied to any animal eating dead animals. Vulture is keselyű, or the special kind of them that eats dead bodies is dögkeselyű, „carcass vulture”. Porosz means Prussian, and isn’t applied to cockroaches. It’s called either csótány or svábbogár, „Swabian beetle”, but Swabian and Prussian is very different. Beget (of father) can’t be translated as születik, since that means to be born. But in thet next line, to be born is translated as szül, but that verb means to give birth. The role of the mother and the newborn is now totally messed up. Grass-skirt is fűszoknya („grass skirt”). The database gave no translation. A weakness of the database is it mostly doesn’t let the user know if the English word is a noun or a verb. A braid and to braid are the same words in English, but in Hungarian, a braid is fonat but to braid is fon. The latter is used, but the word is among a series of nouns regarding hairdo, so it’s probably meant as a noun. Chimney isn’t „cző”, i.e. cső. That means tube. Chimney is kémény. Százseny is an old Russian measure, never used in Hungarian. You can find it only in translations of a few Russian novels. Second can’t be translated as egymás; this word means each other. Second is második (the ordinal number after the first) or másodperc (the time unit). Kettőször is the childish, uneducated form of twice. The normal form is kétszer. And so on, and so on. Lots of errors. How does the database look like in your language? * MEO: originally a Hungarian abbreviation for Quality Checking Department (of factories), but later used also as a verb meaning to quality check
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 21:00:28 +0000
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