On Oct 23, 2005, at 21:36, Barbara Joyce wrote:
I did actually run some of the German text through an online translator
before I made my design. The problem is, although the translators can
process the more common words, they're completely lost with anything
that's
a lace-related term.
That seems to be true even if you get a hold of a native speaker who's
not a lacemaker; I once asked a local "Dutcch-ess" to translate some
text from a lacemaking book and her translation was worse than mine,
and _much_ worse than what Arachne supplied :)
I still don't know what the title means, so I decided to have a little
fun.
I used three online translating sites and tried each one with
"Gekloppelter
Weihnachtsschmuck."
Here's what I got:
Freetranslation.com: gekloppelter christmas jewelry
Babelfish/Alta Vista: more gekloppelter weihnachtsschmuck
translation2.paralink.com: gekloppelter one Christmas-smart
I rest my case. ;-)
You also rest Helen's case :) Helen (in UK) wrote:
I don't know whether this website would be better than Babelfish for
lace things, but for most other uses it certainly is.
www.freetranslation.com
The freetranslation site came the closest to the real meaning, so I'd
depend on it more than on the other two in the future.
What it left undone is "gekloppelter". Granted, I still remember that,
in German, "ge-" denotes past participle (and, by extension, indicates
a verb), so I'd have known to discard that as an "excess baggage",
leaving me with "kloppelter" to look up in a dictionary (BTW... The o
is an "o umlaut", ie it has two dots over it. Since most keyboards
outside Germany do not offer that option, the new "canon" renders it as
"oe", not as a simple "o").
The dictionary in question - highly recommended - is "International
Lace Dictionary". Written by three people - Edith Spee, Ineke van den
Kiebom and Johan Coene - it's also sometimes referred to as "Coene's
dictionary" (trust a man to hog the limelight and the credit <g>) It
has lots of lace - and strictly lace - terms in 16 languages.
In the Deutsch (which means "German", in German) section, there are 9
words which begin with "kloeppel". None of them is "kloeppelter", but
the first - plain vanilla "kloeppel" - is enough to establish that
"kloeppel" is "bobbin". Following up on other "kloeppel-beginning"
words makes it certain that the word refers to bobbin-made lace.
So, you come up with "Christmas Jewelry (made) in Bobbin Lace", which
may not be precise, but it "good enough" :)
I realize that US is not especially demanding on the matter of learning
foreign langauages (one of the reasons I feel comfortable here with
just the two - English and Polish - I know fairly well), but all
lacemakers are used to "scrambling for solutions"; we need this ability
to interpret the not-so-well-documented prickings, and to re-interpret
old laces. It's also what gets us the - well deserved - "Mensa of the
crafts" title. So, to "cross the river", use what _is_ known as your
stepping stones, and trust your instinct when jumping over the small
gap of the unknown...
Of course... A _much_ simpler solution is to just ask on Arachne <g>
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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