hubbabubba
Charter Member
Just make sure that the translations are done by people who are really native speakers and know grammar...
I taught ESL for the Army all over Europe after I retired... and although a Medical Dept. officer... I had
NATIVE ratings for Spanish and Italian, as well as PROFESSIONAL for French and Portuguese..
Regulations provide that Professional rated translations MUST be revised by NATIVE speakers...
To make a story short... the FOR in "for they will not be forgotten" is spot on for French... (because
precisely is what it meant in the English original)... (intransitive verb forms)
In Spanish, however, para ellos means FOR THEM... not BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT ETC.
English is a usage based language... few grammatical expressed rules.. and prepositions totally change
the meaning of verbs... shut-UP and pipe-DOWN mean exactly the same... non-native speakers have
difficulty mastering this... go-ON and go-in... two completely different meanings....
Being native, of course, does not confer infallibility... we got plenty re-blooded Americans who DO NOT
obviously master such subtleties... but it reasonably (provided they are knowledgeable) wards off such errors...
In this day of "automatic" digital translations you see all kinds of problems... just try to interpret some
of the Chinese, Japanese or Korean instructions translated into English on some equipment and products...lol...
NOTWITHSTANDING... a fantastic idea!!!
Thanks gaucho
French is my native language and I speak and write it way better than the average francophone, IMHO...
As for English, I'm pretty fluent in it but, just to be on the safe side, I have English-speaking friends proof-read important documents. The memorial was such a case.
As for German and Spanish, I had to rely on third-parties.
I do use Google translate on occasion, but in this case, I relied entirely on good friends. It was their native language but, as for their mastery of their own grammar...
If you have a better translation to offer, do so, I don't mind. Whenever a new update is made, I would make the correction.