Re: Not me
Message #3 Posted by John Smith on 9 Oct 2002, 4:39 a.m.,
in response to message #2 by Dave Hicks
You should try one of the free web translators out there.
The one I use the most is:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr
where you can type in an English text and have it instantly
traslated to German. As long as you use simple language,
it will deliver perfectly understandable translations. For
instance, instead of asking it to translate:
"I request thee to cease and desist in your obnoxious,
misguided attempt to misuse my utterly astonishing pics,
or face the consequences for thy sin"
which will probably end up saying something about his father's laundry, you would do well in using child-like,
detailed expressions, like this:
"I have seen that you have used one of my images included
in one of yours eBay auctions. I would be very happy if
you would include a text mentioning that the image is not
of the item being sold and and the image was taken from
my site. If you do not want to do that, I ask you to
remove the image from your auction. Thanks."
This gets translated by the Babelfish link above like this:
"Ich habe gesehen, dass Sie eins meiner Bilder verwendet
haben, die in einem von Ihrem eBay Auktionen umfasst
werden. Ich würde sehr glücklich sein, wenn Sie einen
Text umfassen würden, der erwähnt, dass das Bild nicht vom Einzelteil ist, das
verkauft wird und und das Bild von meinem Aufstellungsort genommen wurde. Wenn
Sie nicht das tun möchten, bitte ich Sie, das Bild von Ihrer Auktion zu entfernen.
Dank."
which is quite reasonable German and adequately understandable. In actual practice, I've used this trick
countless of times when dealing with German people, and
communication has always been satisfactory, despite the
fact that I do not speak or understand German at all,
because I used Babelfish to translate back their answers
to English, and the result was perfectly useable.
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