danielmckeever wrote:
Séamus O'Neill wrote:
danielmckeever wrote:
Séamus O'Neill wrote:
danielmckeever wrote:
Hi all, I come from Irish ancestry and am looking to get a couple of phrases tattooed, however I want to be sure that the translations are accurate.
the phrases are: "For those who are gone" and "For the survivors".
I have tried multiple translating search engines and most have translated these phrases as such: "Dóibh siúd atá imithe" and "Do na marthanóirí"
I don't have a lot of trust in the computer to translate these correctly, especially a language as complex as Gaelic.
Thank you for your help and taking the time to read!
I would use
ar son (which literally translates to 'for the sake of') instead of
do. You could also consider using
caillte instead of
imithe, which means 'lost' but is usually euphemistic for 'dead'. You might also want to consider using
fuíoll instead of
marthanóir, which is mostly used in a judicial context. This would then all be something like
Ar son na muintire (atá) caillte, ar son na bhfuíoll.
Thank you for your reply, so if I understand correctly, your translation is roughly: "For the sake of those who are lost." "For the sake of those who remain (survived)". For context, I am memorializing people who have passed away from addiction, and people who have survived.
Very roughly, yes. However, in Irish, it is more common to use more complicated compound prepositions (such as
ar son 'for the sake of',
mar gheall 'concerning',
i dtreo 'so that',
as ucht 'on account of') instead of what would normally just in English translate to 'for'. Just in case you wanted to know, in the older/more traditional spelling and font, this would actually be
Air son na muinntire (atá) caillte, air son na na ḃ(-)fuíoll.
Thank you for your response, I guess my next question would be the use of parenthesis, () in the word, atá. Is the usage of that particular punctuation to specify who we are referring to, in this case, "who are"? Also with the traditional spelling, what does the, - in bhfuíoll, represent/function as? Thanks again.
I put
atá in parenthesis there because it is essentially optional.
caillte is the verbal adjective (which in English is more often referred to as the past participle), and thus functions as an adjective itself. So it would essentially in English be the difference between saying 'for those who are gone' and 'for the gone/left ones' (which in English sounds kind of strange, and is why we are more prone to producing the former construction).
The
(-) in the word
ḃ(-)fuíoll basically just represents that you could write
ḃ-fuíoll or
ḃfuíoll, albeit the latter being more common