MorkTheFiddle wrote:DeepL translates only the first verse of this poem from Housman, so I tried Reverso. The original English is followed by French, Spanish and German (the only languages I can even begin to understand). Not sure the "away" is correctly translated in any of the three? But I thought, overall, not too bad.
German actually seems decent for away, with use of the word "weggeben". "Eineinhalb" is clearly wrong, though, as that should be einundzwanzig.
The thing with many online translators and poetry is that they often overlook archaic turns of phrases that are used for poetic effect, and the breaking up of a single line into two stanzas of text confuses them. Also, some poetic nuances, especially things like rhyme and alliteration, aren't always able to be used in a TL in similar ways. IMO, poetry and songs are the hardest things to translate.
For me, I use Deepl and Linguee. I love how they often give sentence examples when searching for a single word. Deepl also knows a lot of popular expressions and colloquial turns of phrase, which Google often gets wrong. I used to use Leo, but Linguee has better examples, so I switched.
Languages: English (N), German (C2), Swiss German (depends on the day), Swedish (A1), Mandarin (beginner)
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