Free On-Line Translators

Not so much...

If you take, say, a German phrase and run it through a translator into English, you'll find that most of the individual words are translated exactly to English, generally with the primary meaning of the words. So if a word has both a general meaning and a slang or idiomatic meaning, it'll give it the general meaning, and you have to guess at any else.

Grammar usually works well as long as you're working with an inflected language (has discrete word endings (worker/workers/worker's) or obvious internal changes (man/men/men's).

Word order doesn't change. English puts the verb right after the subject. Latin puts it at the end of the sentence. German breaks up lots of verbs and puts the main part after the subject and the prefix at the end of the sentence. Wherever the word falls in the original, it'll fall in the transltion.

Any word the translator doesn't know will generally remain unchanged. Like "the" and "it's" in your example. (I can't say this for sure, but I'm guessing "the" doesn't mean "the" in Icelandic, and the same for "it's".

If you keep the original REAL simple, you can probably get away with it.

But don't be surprised if some Icelandic person sends you a note...

Shadow_Ferret said:

How reliable are these? And which are the best ones?

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They range from bad to very very bad. I'm speaking as someone who knows several languages (bilingual in French, functional in Italian, Spanish and Russian, now learning Japanese, and have dabbled in Icelandic... and those are just the living languages; coincidentally enough I actually studied Old Norse, among a handful of dead languages!). The only use for online translators is to give you the general gist of a text. The grammar will be at least wrong, and sometimes ridiculously wrong; a good chunk of the vocabulary or spelling will be wrong too. So you can get the overall gist, but you definitely cannot just use the translation as-is.

For example, "the sol" cannot possibly be the Icelandic translation of "the sun," because "the" isn't an Icelandic word... and even if it were an Icelandic word, it wouldn't be spelled that way: they don't use "th"--they have their own weird letters to represent the two different "th" sounds (th as in thin vs. th as in this). Two different, weird, runic-looking letters. "It's" is also not Icelandic, and there's no reason for both the letters in "Eg" to be capitalized.

Old Norse is close enough to Icelandic that Icelanders can read the Sagas in the original. Its resemblance to modern Icelandic is something like the resemblance of Shakespeare's English to modern English, if not closer. If you have a small chunk of change to spare ($50?), you might want to consider looking all over the web (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and anywhere else you can think of) to see if you can get your hands on a bilingual (English/Old Norse) edition of the Icelandic Sagas, or at least one of the Sagas. I mean the kind that's got Old Norse on one page and English on the facing page. I'd bet that you'd find plenty of "words of power"-type passages in there, plenty of spooky things that you could take directly from there to use in your story. (Remember that since the Sagas are around a thousand years old, they're not copyrighted--you can use them however you want.) It may also be worth your while to go to the local library and seek a librarian's help in finding such a book; if they don't have it, they may be able to order it via interlibrary loan.

As for the cutesy "here comes the sun" thing, I know that was cutesy, but just FYI, since the Beatles song is almost certainly still copyrighted, you couldn't translate it and use the translation in your book without permission.

I could be wrong, but I'd bet if there's a university where you are, there's someone there who could help you (potentially even with "dead" languages) and would probably be happy to find someone interested in their linguistic expertise. Alternately, a student looking for a challenge might find this interesting.

Just a thought...

Liz

Or, if you want to dabble in Old Norse, you can check out "An Introduction to Old Norse" by E.V. Gordon from your library (ISBN 0-19-811184-3). I picked up a copy several years ago at Borders for $29.95, which seemed pretty reasonable to me at the time, but now I see Amazon has it listed for $59.50 .

Shadow_Ferret said:

Ideagirl, another question. Whenever I use that translator, it translates the god Thor to -thorax. What's up with that?

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Like I said, online translators range from bad to very very bad. I doubt "thorax" is even a word in Icelandic, since they've invented their own, Old Norse-based (i.e. not Latin-based) names for everything (e.g. "television," "automobile," etc., all these words that we have in English that we made up out of Latin roots, they re-created in Icelandic out of Old Norse roots).

I can recommend that intro to old norse book that someone mentioned--it was my textbook in the class I took.

As for Lewis Carroll, that sounds like a good idea, and it's too old to still be copyrighted. But, again, you're going to need to have an Icelandic speaker check the translation (or else find a bilingual English-Icelandic version of the book!! ). Since you're on the web, though, surely you can find some Icelandic person on the web to take a look at it for you--it's not long, it's not like it would take much of their time.

My family all speak another language but I am English-speaking. Whenever I try to use online translators to compose my emails and letters, the results always seem to be hilarious rather than accurate (at least according to my family). I did find that this web page: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/language_resources.html
has a forum, where presumably you can ask someone to help you.
Also, Roberta Frank (http://www.yale.edu/english/profiles/frank.html) over at Yale seems to be an expert on the language. I’m not sure if she’d be willing to help, but it’s worth a try.