Розговор:Всевобчой учельник

The Spanish, Italian and French miss the negation on the second sentence: The more serious problem might be the translational shift, though. Examples in these texts:

• It is a boy.
• This is a boy.
• There is a boy.
• Here is a boy.

What will the later examples get to after a few translations?

I try to use the most common way of expressing the meaning in this languages; anyway, everybody can change the translations --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 23:46, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

This translation shift exists in slavic translations too, but I do not know how to avoid it - for example "Здесь мальчик" will be strange for Russian hear - they say "Это мальчик" in this situation. Tatars always say "Malay bar" (Boy exists), but never "Here is a boy". --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 23:50, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, the common way to avoid this is to not translate literaly, but to keep an eye on the way things are expressed in the target language. In this case, there are some drawback to that, however:

1. The sentences will mean the same thing, but they are not expressed the same- it would be learning the idiom without knowing the vocabulary.
2. Since there's not much context to those sentences, for each sentence you'd need a short description on the talk page to explain what it is supposed to be about.

Eg.

• 1. This is like the introduction of the boy, except that we don't give the name.
  2. We note that unrelated to the boy, there's no girl here.

Etc. The point about the Rosetta stone was of course that there was plenty of context, so even where sentences were completely different, the would-be translator would still have an idea of what was going on.

I know, not much help, but the philosophers' stone isn't easy to make. It may allow you to speak all tongues, but that's probably because you had to travel all the lands of the world to uncover its secret. Aliter 21:17, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Now the goal is simply - to have examples of simple situations, expressed by different languages. The project is small now, but when it will develop, we will try to invite native speakers from it's wikipedias - now it is too early in my opinion. Ok, I will try to change sentences in order that they will be more monotonious in expression. We plan to make theoretical part of the course, something like Grammatica Universalis, where correct grammar descriptions with tables will be given. But in practical aspect - and now we work with practical part of the course - it is quite clear to me that the same meaning can be somewhat different expressed in different languages, and some combinations are grammatically correct but stylistically unused. Maybe better that native speakers decide --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 21:33, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Latin

May I feel free to change the latin nonsense that is there to something that makes syntactical sense?--Ioshus 17:00, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Sure! The prototypes are just for changing --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 17:02, 17 September 2006 (UTC)