Auxdebla antaux la granda amerikana eklipso de 2017:
Pregxo:
Kara Dio, se vi volas, ke ni kulpigu Trump; donu al ni signon. Kiel, kasxu
la sunon ... Ajna tempo dum la venonta semajno.
Dankon,
Amerikanoj
- - -
Original English below.
Most of the people who can read this know English, but not yet much Esperanto.
I still lead with E-o, but longer stuff is still in English to help ease you into the wider world. Prove me wrong, post some long espo stuff right back at me!
--
Anyway --
Before the Eclipse -
Overheard before the Great American Eclipse of 2017
Prayer:
Dear God, if you want us to impeach Trump, give us a sign.
Like, blot out the sun...
Any time in the next week.
-Thanks,
-Americans
Notes:
the English was sent to me by a friend (not enough time to pass it on before the eclipse, so I changed the title from "Prayer" to "Before the Eclipse").
I tried to put it into Esperanto.
Monoglots, people who know only one language (so far), often think you simply swap one word for another -- but it seldom works that way for more than a few words. Reality is sliced into neat little concepts called words, in different ways in different cultures. Like, look at a real rainbow, not just a cartoon painting of separate color bands -- reality is one long gradual shift across a continuous spectrum, and not everybody slices it into parts in the same places.
Like, where does Blue end, and Green begin? A few cultures even make it only two or three words, maybe something like Dark, Medium, Light. And since they grew up with that, most of them really have trouble clearly seeing the primaryand secondary colors that many of us had in our crayon boxes.
Of course, some languages have more words. Even in English, how many people clearly agree on the meaning of words like Indigo, taupe, chartreuse, beige, tan, brown, amber, etc. THe words are endless, but I hear more fights over precise meanings, than agreements.
.
This "Prayer" was one of the more challenging translations I've made, lately. Short, but with some words that were idiomatic, so I looked them up -- and then
still didn't know. Is "impeach" in the sense of challenging the President's continued employment as such, a strictly American concept? The various print and online dictionaries wouldn't give me anything that couldn't instead mean other things, nothing to do with impeachment. I settled on kulpigu; maybe something like `find culpable', rather than akuzu, or something else that could
be simply accuse, or blame, or something. .
And "give us a sign" --I wasn't absolutely sure that "sign" might not come out like "billboard" or something -- I considered "indikon"; but settled back on sign; I think it's not only for mundane signs like advertisements, but works here, too.
"blot out" was tough. It\s metaphorical, which might cross over to other languages, but maybe not. I settled on "kasxi", to hide. (kasxu, to make hidden). Maybe I was too cautious.
Kiel vi tradukus gxin?
--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
# Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)
* Origin: LiveWire BBS - Synchronet - LiveWireBBS.com (1:2320/100)