German Translation II

I thought I would give the two translation sites I mentioned in the last post a sterner test. I scanned in the following paragraph of text:

Hier wird dogmatisch argumentiert, ein Sieg über den Tod könne nur durch die leibliche Auferstehung Jesu errungen worden sein. Damit wird Paulus dogmatisch vorgeschrieben, wie er zu denken hat. Setzen wir einmal einen Augenblick voraus, das sei wirklich die Meinung des Paulus, dann ergäben sich unlösbare Fragen. Z.B.: Wieso bedeutet die leibliche Auferstehung Jesu die Überwindung des Todes überhaupt, zumal wenn man zugleich betont, es handele sich be idem Leib des Auferstandenen um denselben Leib, den auch der Gekreuzigte gehabt habe? Wieso unterscheidet sich diese Wiederbelebung eines Leibes prinzipiell von den Totenauferweckungen in den Evangelien?

Here is what Yahoo Babelfish came up with:

Here dogmatisch one argues, a victory over death can have been achieved only by physical resurrection Jesu. Thus Paulus is dogmatisch prescribed, how he has to think. If we presuppose once one instant, that are really the opinion of the Paulus, then unsolvable questions would result. E.G.: Why does physical resurrection Jesu mean the overcoming of death at all, particularly since if one stresses at the same time, it concerns fuel element idem body of the Auferstandenen the same body, which also the Gekreuzigte had? Why does this revival of a body differ in principle from the dead on arousing in the gospels?

Not only is this pretty meaningless, there are a number of words left untranslated.

Here is what Google Translate came up with:

Here is dogmatically argued that a victory over death could have been achieved only through the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Here Paul is dogmatically imposed, as he thought. Let's us assume for a moment that was really the opinion of Paul, then there would be unsolvable issues. For example: Why does the bodily resurrection of Jesus overcoming death at all, especially if one also insists that it is where prizes constituted body of the resurrected by the same body which had the even had the Crucified? Why is this different in principle from the revival of a bodily resurrection of the dead in the Gospels?

Not perfect by any means (though it does help to have the context - as it stands it seems a pretty random paragraph) but a lot lot better than Babelfish. It gets all the vocab and reads much more like an English paragraph.

German Translation

One of the joys (!) of doing a PhD in NT is learning German. Thankfully in this Internet age there are a number of helps available. The danger, of course, is that you can rely too much on on-line dictionaries. However, they do make life a lot easier.

I use on-line dictionaries all the time, probably in this order:
http://www.dict.cc
http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/de-en/
http://dict.leo.org/

Up until recently I had been skeptical about on-line translation sites, mainly because I had only used Yahoo's Babelfish. However, recently I have been using Google Translate and have been very impressed. As a comparison, here is a German phrase I was looking at this morning: 'Setzen wir einmal einen Augenblick voraus'. Babelfish renders it: 'We presuppose once one instant' which is a word for word rendering and is next to useless. However, Google produces: 'Let's assume for a moment'. Bingo! Google gets the idiom and provides a good translation. Now, it is not always so good but I am finding that often it is.

German

One of the interesting (!) features of the German language is the ‘overloaded adjective construction’. In English we might say: The man, who was walking his recently purchased Boxer dog, stumbled across two men burgling his neighbour’s house.
German might put it like his: The walking his recently purchased Boxer dog man stumbled across two men burgling his neighbour’s house.

Now, if that’s not interesting I don’t know what is…