Translation of Newspaper article
I've just done this using a new bit of translating software which seems pretty good. It's here: Wordsoft anywhere
I had saved an article from the Diario Menorca last year so I chose that as a short text to use in the software. It worked pretty well, simple cut and paste and off I went. Give it a try. Here's the text I used:menorca
And here is the translation, cut and paste job I'm afraid.
Catalonia is turning out to be a pretty pushy and barely tolerant autonomy. First and foremost they have made and continue to make their language a distressing bone of contention when language should serve as a means of uniting rather than separating people. In Catalonia they even prohibit trades-people from naming their businesses in Castellano. It's not merely prohibited, they incur a fine for doing something which should be the perfect right of any individual. What's more, the problem doesn't end there, they regard the Baleares as forming a part of the Països Catalans, (Catalan regions), while simultaneously destroying the richness of our language. The characteristic forms and idiomatic twists and turns of Menorcan which make up our own particular linguistic bounty is under threat thanks to four politicians. The day may come when we speak better Catalan at the price of no longer speaking Menorcan. And we are Balearic Islanders: Mallorcans, Menorcans, Ibicencos and so on; but we are by no means Catalans, no matter how much they insist we are.
I want and I like that Menorcan is spoken in Menorca, in Menorcan. The fact that there are those manipulating this legitimate right from their offices is a serious aberration. It's like trying to force Andalucians to speak Valladolid Castellano, or trying to get Scots to speak Southern English. Think of the stupid waste of linguistic richness if they were to be forced to call potatoes potatoes instead of tatties.
What will happen when all the Catalans in Catalonia speak only Catalan? Well, nothing very much at all. The world will go on as usual. The only thing that will happen is that Catalans outside of Catalonia won't know how to express themselves without recourse to a dictionary when ordering food in a restaurant in say, Toledo, Valladolid, Guadalajara and Madrid. What a sorry state of affairs it would be to have to use a dictionary in any of those places simply in order to get the towels changed in the bathroom!
Catalonia has the right to speak its own language, a beautiful language, of course it does. But what it has no right whatever to do is to suppress other languages, other tongues, in pursuit of the absolute exclusivity of its own language. Incidentally, this attitude has very much in common with, if not in fact being identical to, but in reverse, that unjust idiocy, that dour and unfair decree which mandated that the Catalans were to speak only Castellano and not Catalan. They should not lapse into that transgression of which they were so unjustly victims during the dictatorship. They have to avoid the temptations of dictatorship. A Catalan should speak Catalan in Catalonia while evincing at the same time, a flexibility and respect for other languages spoken in Catalonia.
Take a place like Menorca which in summertime is a linguistic tower of babel. Imagine if some bright spark politician were to subject all restaurants, bars, hotels and other places frequented by our visitors to an edict that all labelling was to be only in Menorcan; no more “black white coffee”, cafè amb llet; no "Norway lost", “caramel-la”, no "squid batter fiedin" “calamar a la romana”; and so on for the English speakers and much the same for the French and Germans in their own languages.
A Menorcan would certainly have no problems reading these announcements but would be very much on his own when it came to it. Is that what we need? Is that what we want: that everything that might make a tourists visit more interesting, smoothing the way for a pleasant stay , be written only in Menorcan as opposed to sensibly making things easier by writing information in their native languages?
What can I say? To me, to enforce the use of a single language, punishing those who speak another, even if it is their mother tongue, is an aberration which, it seems to me, is unsupported by most people who are much smarter day to day than politicians give them credit for. It's down to four politicians, maybe because there are subsidies involved; that a day could arise when only some old folks speak our rich and precious Menorcan and, in the end, it is lost forever.
JOSÉ MARÍA PONS MUÑOZ 24/08/2010
3 Answers
Looks great...thanks!
Whoa, I think that's an amazing machine translation! Thanks for the software tip, Birdland--can't wait to try it out.
I must say just in case there is any misunderstanding that the translater takes small pieces of the original and approximates a fuzzy translation. Once you have that you then need, as always, to reappraise it and render it to what you're looking for. It's an aid rather than a solution 
. The machine did not give me that translation, that is what I did while using the machine as a rough guide.
