I’m trying to set up a website for my daughter’s Brownie troop. The page comes with a translator. It translates “Girl Scout Brownies” to “MES De Brownies Del Explorador De la Muchacha”. 1) What is MES? and 2) Doesn’t that say something about the explorer of the girl? :o I’m rusty on my Spanish. I really would like to avoid any off-color phrases on this page. THANKS!
Explorer of the girl . . . girl scout . . .
I don’t know any Spanish, but that sounds pretty close.
Mes = month. Is it appearing though in all caps?
Yes, “MES” all caps.
It translates “Mid-Continent Girl Scout Council” to “Consejo Del Explorador De la Muchacha De Mid-Continent”
Consejo is the correct word for council.
I found a webpage for a Mexican boy scout troop.
They just use “Grupo Scout 17”.
Your translator is thinking that “scout” is modifying “girl” instead of the other way around.
A literal translation of the last sentence would be “Council of the Explorer of the Girl of Mid-Continent.”
Spanish adjectives usually come after the noun they modify (although not always.)
There’s noting obscene in the translations, but they don’t make much sense.
Here, try this link. It’s to the Los Angeles area Girl Scout council. You can see how they write stuff in Spanish out here.
http://www.Angeles.org/page6.html
The group is just called “Las Girl Scouts”
My problem is that the translator is on the page available for any Spanish speaking girl that wishes to use it. I’m writing the page in English. Maybe I better just avoid Girl Scout on the pages until I can figure this one out.
According to my (very good) Spanish dictionary, a Brownie girl scout is a “Nina Exploradora.” (There should be a tilde over the second n in “Nina”; I haven’t figured out how to do those yet.)
OK, lessee if this works:
Niña Exploradora
I’d be careful of those brownie jokes.
I sent an e-mail to GO (that’s where I got the nice easy page for the troop) explaining the problem. They said that I need to talk to the translator people. I asked them that since there are SO many Girl Scouts if maybe they could get the translator to recognize that phrase so it doesn’t translate the page to an “explorer of the girl” troop page. I barely had any French and no German or Portugese but the best I can tell it translates Girl Scout the same way in all languages. I’m feeling really bad. My only responsibility was to find a nice easy way for them to get a homepage and I went with GO BECAUSE of the translator that comes with it so that Girl Guides from other countries could read our page. No answer yet from SYSTRAN the translator people.
Have your tried hyphenating girl-scout or turning girlscout into a compound word? If they don’t retranslate correctly, they may be simply unrecognized by the translator and left alone.
If that works, of course, you’re going to have to put a message on your page explaining how to enter the words for anyone else that uses the translator.
Tom~
This translator takes the whole page and translates it. You only select which language. Here’s a sample of a finished page: http://homepages.go.com/~somomom/noshame.html
According to babelfish.altavista.com[/com] it is:
Brownies del explorador de la muchacha
But how do you spell SOCKS in Spanish? 
There are far too many Baldwins. The only Baldwin I care for is a piano …
So it looks to my untrained eye as though the translator works only on non-image text that you place on the page. If that is true, then I would suggest you throw up a quick test page including the texts
Girl-Scouts
Girl_Scouts
GirlScouts
and some other combinations.
My guess would be that one or more of them will remain untranslated just as “breastfeeding” was left untranslated on the page you linked.
The ideal solution is to have SYSTRAN modify their routine to recognize the appropriate translation, but in the interim, having text that is not mistranslated seems to be worth the effort.
Tom~
Tom, you’re a genius! (Or why didn’t I think of that?) The Girl_Scout works and is not grammatically weird like Girl-Scout or GirlScout. I think I’ll go with that! I’m going to keep on the SYSTRAN people though.
Thank you!