Es steht schlecht um das Nördliche Breitmaulnashorn: Weltweit leben nur noch ein Männchen und zwei Weibchen, beschützt von Bodyguards.*
From Zeit.de, August 2016
Translation offered by the translation software:
It stands badly the northern wide mouth rhinoceros: Worldwide only a little man and two females, protected by bodyguards live.
(translation software: online-translator.com)
Spotlight translation:
The odds are against (the survival of) the northern white rhinoceros: worldwide, there are only one male and two female specimens left, and they are protected by bodyguards.
Analysis
- This month’s text excerptAuszugexcerpt illustrates an aspect of translation that often causes great difficulty, not only for translation software, but also for human translators: the names of flora and fauna.
- Common names of plants and animals can be found in any good dictionary, but more unusual names are sometimes hard to find. In the past, human translators working on texts dealing with nature had to go to specialized libraries or make phone calls to zoos and botanical gardens to find out the right nomenclature.
- With the adventAufkommen, Ankunftadvent of the internet, research has become a lot easier, but you still have to make sure you have exactly the right term. Your safest bet will often be to find out the Latin name of the plant or animal you’re looking for and take your research from there.
- The translation program we tried this month obviously didn’t have Breitmaulnashorn in its internal dictionary, so the individual parts of the name were translated literallywortwörtlichliterally — unfortunately, there is no such animal as a wide-mouth rhinoceros.
- The animal’s Latin name, Ceratotherium simum, will lead you to the correct English terms: “white rhinoceros” or “square-lipped rhinoceros”. You will also find that there are two subspecies, the southern and the northern white rhinoceros. Note that in English, animal and plant names are not to capitalizegroßschreibencapitalized, whereas in German, you capitalize Nördlich to indicate that the word is part of the name.
- Interestingly, the term “white rhino” itself is said to be a mistranslation. The English word “white” might have been wrongly translated from the Dutch word wijd (“wide”), which refers to the width of the rhino’s mouth. So the species with the wide mouth was called a “white rhino”, and the one with the narrower mouth (the Spitzmaulnashorn) became the “black rhino”.
* Since this article was written, Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, has sadly to pass awayversterben, entschlafenpassed away. Researchers are now trying to save the speciesUnterartsubspecies from extinctionAussterbenextinction with the help of Sudan’s genetic material.
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