I have been working on a translation of the United States Constitution into Esperanto (I could not find one on the Internet). I had found translations in French, Spanish, German, and even Russian.
I have a fairly comprehensive English-Esperanto dictionary, but there are some terms in the Constitution that seem to defy proper translation:
adjourn (as a house of Congress ending its session).
shall/shall not (in passages in which a person or agency of government, for example, is directed by the Constitution to do something, or is prohibited from doing something).
term (such as the President’s four-year term, or the time Congress is in
session).
posterity (as in the Preamble; the word is actually absent from my dictionary).
impeach (rendered as formala akuzo, “formal accusation/indictment” in the dictionary).
There are others, I suppose, but I don’t remember them offhand.
Google Translate includes Esperanto as one of its languages.
You might look at synonyms of words of interest and see if there are Esperanto equivalents.
With Google translate, always try stuff one at a time and as a sentence, and then look up the words. You can get pretty good with that. Then have a really good Esperanto speaker look at it and suggests fixes.
And, yes, look up synonyms. Also maybe try other common phrases that use those words. For the “shall” stuff, maybe try looking up the Ten Commandments in Esperanto, for example. It may just be as simple as stating it in the future tense, with the fact that it is a directive implied.
“Shall/shall not” is a peculiarity of English, using the same auxiliary verb to indicate (a) a future event, and (b) an immediate obligation. Esperanto has to have a word or idiom with the same sense in English as “must”, and that’s what you’re looking for.
This sounds great, but I’d start with something shorter: the Declaration of Independance?
I just tried translating something into The Fershner Secret Language and it was so time-consuming that I gave up and switched to just translating a Psalm first. And I think I’m going to stop there.
So I’m dying to know, why are you doing this? Anyone ask you to, or is there someone who’ll read it when you’re done? Mine’ll end up written in calligraphy onto nice paper as a Christmas present.
I just wanted to have it for myself; a labor of love, perhaps. I have had an interest in languages for years. I was disappointed to find no Esperanto version of the U. S. Constitution online, so I decided to prepare my own. I had done it once before, many years ago, but that copy has long since been discarded.
I had supposed there might be a “really good Esperanto speaker” among the Teeming Millions. 
Paging Sunspace!
He’s quite good with Esperanto–if he doesn’t show up here, Dougie, you may want to drop him a PM.
We used to have matt_mcl, but it looks like he hasn’t signed on in months.
Thanks…that’s fine…I’m in no hurry.
Dougie: complete your translation as best you can. Then post it at a website and link to here and an Esperanto forum and ask for comments.
What website should I use?
I used to be a terrible Esperanto speaker a couple of decades back. I’m chiming in here not to help but to give a shout out to the book, “Off to Be the Wizard” which has several thoughts about Esperanto scattered throughout. And I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler, but Esperanto is the language of magic in the book which had me in hysterics repeatedly. A fun afternoon read for people wanting to translate Esperanto in their spare time!
Interesting exercise. May I suggest the following?
**adjourn: **fermi
**shall/shall not: **devas ne
**term: **daŭro (or servdaŭro to be more specific)
**posterity: **posteuloj, posteularo
**impeach: **akuzi
You might be interested in Humphrey Tonkin’s translation of the Declaration of Independence (“A Declaration for All” available from Esperanto-USA.org) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which has an Esperanto translation available on the ohchr.org website for examples of similar legal documents.
Good. I was afraid you were saying Esperanto pronto.
Regards,
Shodan
There is a fine distinction in English between “shall” and “will”, but I can never remember what it is. I just know they’re supposed to mean slightly different things.
It’s even more confusing in that the convention reverses for the first person and for other persons, at least according to the old pedants. The normal form is “I shall” and “you/he/she/it will”, but the emphatic form is “I will” and “you/he/she/it shall”.
I think that in some contexts, there might also be the implication that “will” implies merely an intention, but “shall” implies an obligation.
The classic Victorian example was to consider the difference between
“I shall drown, and no-one will save me”
and
“I will drown, and no-one shall save me”.
“Shall” is borderline archaic in American English. It’s not used much in everyday speech. Using it often evokes an air of stuffy formality: Whatever shall we do? I’d expect to hear it more commonly used in England, and I wonder if it was more common in 18th Century America, too.