http://www.lonweb.org/daisy/ds-spanish-lorna.htm
But when I started comparing the two versions, I was a bit discouraged. The reason is that even though I'm a beginner, it looks to me like it's not a very good translation. For example:
Daisy no era aún muy conocida pero de vez en cuando recibía llamadas de personas que habían leído su anuncio en un periódico local.
Daisy wasn't very well known yet but occasionally people telephoned her from the advertisement she had put in the local newspaper.
Now, it looks to me like it says she received calls from people who had read her ad in a local newspaper. None of the things I've bolder are present in their English translation. Of course I know that doesn't change the gist of it, but from the point of view of trying to learn the language, it's very confusing. I know an accurate translation can't be word-for-word most of the time, but why change it more than necessary? They seem to have changed the verbs used, the pronoun (from her ad to the ad) etc. All things that you generally can't ignore when reading, listening or speaking. My goal is to translate the text into English, and then back into Spanish (on my own) and use the original texts to check how well I'm doing at each stage. So need it to be precise. If I had translated it myself with the help of a dictionary, I would never have come up with the text they provided.
Have I mistranslated it, or am I missing something?
The reason it's such a problem is that sometimes it makes me question other phrases they have that might need to be changed for all know, such as
"Hola, ¿puedo hacer algo por ustéd?"
""Hello, can I help you?"
...now I have trouble telling if I would be changing the meaning with "can I do anything for you?", since this is a different meaning in English, but it might not be in Spanish.
So, should I stop second guessing the provided translations? Or have I picked a bad piece of text to work with?
Thanks for reading my long winded first post!