juman Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5250 days ago 101 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: French
| Message 1 of 3 06 February 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged |
I'm sorry but my knowledge is not good enough yet to write this all in french but I hope it is ok...
I'm working on the text of the first Harry Potter book and got stuck on the title. The french title is "Harry Potter à
L'École des Sorciers" and the original title is "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". If I would translate the french
title I would end up with something like "Harry Potter at the school of wizards" however if you use Google Translate
and translate the french text to English you get : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
So is there anything in the french text that actually translates to "stone".. is it some kind of wordplay or expression I
do not get or is Google Translate just giving the answer based what someone have put in there?
1 person has voted this message useful
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6614 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 2 of 3 06 February 2012 at 1:58pm | IP Logged |
Yeah, it's Google Translate being really clever and translating the French title into the English one. There's nothing about a stone in the French title.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5352 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 3 of 3 06 February 2012 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
What you saw was statistical machine translation in action. Google trains its translation tool with lots of bilingual texts. Therefore it "knows" that "Harry Potter à L'École des Sorciers" is the French translation of the English book title "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone".
3 persons have voted this message useful
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