[MissInformation]

llegar: to arrive (llego, llegas, llega, llegamos, llegan). Chances are, if you whisper "Llego my eggo." to the person sitting next to you while the teacher is teaching this word, they will laugh and the teacher will glare.

At work we have to deal with a lot of Spanish speaking people, and only one person in our office is fluent in Spanish. If she's out of the office, we deal as well as we can. There are translation programs on the Internet, which we will use. They get the point across, but I highly suspect they make us sound a bit dumb, sort of like "Me Tarzan, you Jane".

I had my friend, who majored in Spanish and spent time living in Argentina, translate the following sentence: "It is what it is, and shall be forever more, no matter the consequences." She translated it as: "Lo que sea, sea, y sera por siempre, no importan las consecuencias." The Internet translator put it as this: "Es lo que es, y será para siempre más, ningún asunto las consecuencias." She said the translator's version was fine but that "lo que sea, sea" was more poetic.

As I was still not finished wasting time, I put both Spanish sentences back into the translator and translated them back to English. Lynette's version came back to English as: "What be, be, and to be for always, it do not they matter the consequences." and the translator's came back to English as: "Is what is, and will be for always more, no matter the consequences."

I think I'll spare you the details of what happens when you translate the translated translation... And I think there is a lesson to be learned here, maybe something about the subjectiveness of translation, but it's most likely something more along the lines of how much time a person can waste when they really put their minds to it...

Heidi