One of the clothes dryers in my apartment building has broken, so I went ahead and placed an “Out of Order” sign on it before somebody else pays $1.50 for 45 minutes of tumbling with no hot air.
Then it occurred to me that some of my Mexican, Spanish-speaking neighbors might not understand it (I’m not sure how many of them are fluent in English), so I want to add the Spanish equivalent.
However, given that “out of order” is something of an idiom, I’m worried that a direct computer translation might make no sense. Here’s what my Mac’s translation widget came up with:
“fuera de servicio”
That looks okay to me; it appears that it didn’t translate it literally, but took the idiom status into consideration and came up with “out of service”. Will it make sense to a Mexican Spanish speaker?
Actually, I can kind of see how “fuera/it was” works here. There is some implication. The literal translation of “fuera de servicio” would seem to be “it was of service”. But the implication of the phrase is “It was, but is no longer, of service”. Or, in plain English, “it used to work, and now it doesn’t.”
As I said, that’s wrong. Fuera is an adverb, and means “out” in this context, literally “out of service.” The etymology is from Latin forās, “outside.”
It has nothing whatever to do with the verb form fuera, which is first and third person (and formal second person) imperfect subjunctive of ser, “to be” (and also of ir, “to go.”). The etymology is from similar verb forms in Latin.
Don’t rely on on-line translations for word meanings.
