TRANSLATION HELP PLZ -- German / English.
I am proofreading a document which was translated from German to English and in German it starts like this:
"Wie sagt mensch so schön? Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte."
It seems like a good translation would be, "How does the saying go? 'A picture is worth a thousand words?'
Is this the best translation of the first phrase? Thank youuuuuuu!
@eribloodlust: Seems fine. There are some subtle nuances to the first sentence that are lost (the fact that "mensch" is used instead of the mainstream "man"; the evaluation of the saying as "schön"), but it probably would be hard to put them into the translation without the sentence starting to sound awkward. (Maybe one could put a "nice" before the "saying" or something like that, dunno …)
@plomlompom the context of the work is to describe a trans pinup art collection, so using mench in the german context makes a lot of sense, but if the translation doesnt require any similar words, keeping gender out of it i think gets the point across the same?
thanks! Maybe I could say "How does that lovely saying go?"
@eribloodlust: Sounds lovely :-)
Something like the "mensch" issue is probably best handled by adopting a similar approach to gender in the overall text (if possible; English doesn't seem quite so frantic about putting gender into every corner of the grammar as German, so there might be less substance to visibly work on) instead of focusing on direct translation in individual sentences.