Comments on: Ich bin ein Bibliotecario

By: Meg

Meg — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:11:59 +0000

Actually, I don’t know why Babelfish decided to translate library as “архив” because, like English, that actually means archive in Russian. The Russian word for library is “библиотека” – “biblioteka”, coming from the Greek like many of the other languages.

Thanks for the site. It is continually interesting!

By: KathyS

KathyS — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:19:18 +0000

I was sounding out the Russian and Greek, and I am amused at how *most* of your examples have obviously similar roots. The Russian word for “library” sounds like “archeev”, ie, our word for “archive”, and in Greek sounds like “bibliotiki”. The Russian “spravka” (reference), however, doesn’t sound at all like anything in English. Lots of fun!

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:29:32 +0000

@Lisa: thank you for the correction (and I’m happy to hear my website is useful). I noticed there were some differences between what Babel Fish came up with versus how Google translated words – another was Google gave “Referenz” as the German translation for “reference” – machine translation is still far from perfect.

In fact, a writer I used to know took advantage of the quirks of machine translation when he was suffering from writer’s block or was unhappy with a particular passage. He would enter his text, translate it to one language, then translate from that language to a third, and then finally back to English. Sometimes the resulting word jumble would inspire him with new phrasing or word order, and get him back to writing.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:09:31 +0000

About the German word for reading… Messwert refers to the reading of a measurement in a data-gathering sense. The word Lesen means reading in the sense that you intended. (http://dict.leo.org/ is a really great English-German dictionary online)

(I love your blog by the way – have found it really useful a number of times.)