What is the best online translator? I’d like to test a few, so could a fluent Spanish-speaking doper please translate this to English?
“Please only cut the grass once every two weeks.”
Thanks.
Need context.
Are you ready to pop a vein because they’re cutting the grass too often? Otherwise, the “only” wouldn’t be said.
Formal or informal? Bonus points, the forms are different in different dialects; sometimes they’re even inverted. My formal would sound familiar to someone from Costa Rica and vice versa.
Any specific target dialect? Some dialects would use por favor followed by an imperative, some would use favor de cortar.
Is this adressed to a single person or several? In the dialects that would use the imperative, this one needs to match the number.
Something that would word in most contexts would be:
Por favor corte el cesped una vez cada dos semanas
(can change ‘cesped’ for ‘pasto’)
Well, I doubt he’s hired a roving band of Spaniards to cut his grass.
No veins popping; just want to let them know. Informal. No specific dialect. Would be addressed to two people.
being more than one addressee, then something like this would work better:
Por favor, corten el cesped una vez cada dos semanas
Thanks so much.
I don’t think there are any truly reliable online translators. For example, Google Translate gives:
This uses the infinitive instead of the imperative as given by **DonJorge’**s translations.
In my experience, the only way to get a translation right is to ask either a native speaker or someone with a lot of experience in the language. Machine translation may give you the gist, but won’t be grammatically accurate - and sometimes may give a completely erroneous meaning. And as Nava says, there are regional variations so that Latin American Spanish differs from the Spanish of Spain (and there are further variations within these).
Agreed - I’ve literally seen Google Translate switch between 2 opposite meanings for a sentence depending on whether or not I entered a period at the end.
Por favor, sólo corte el césped una vez cada dos semanas.
source"http://www.dutranslation.com/Spanish/"
If you want a precise translation, it would help if you wrote more precisely. I think that Nava and others are correctly interpreting your meaning as a request to cut the grass less often, but what you actually said was to limit the bi-weekly chores to just cutting the grass, and not also washing the car or trimming the hedges.
What you should have said was, “Please cut the grass only once every two weeks.”