Yes this is homework, just need a push in the right direction.
Can someone help with the phrase:
“lo zaino cammina a scuola e il temperino corre.”
As near as me daughtere can figure it means:
“The backpack walks to school and the pencil sharpener runs.”
Is that even close?
Looks exactly right to me.
Makes no sense, mind you, but I don’t see any flaws in the translation.
Of course, my Italian is no great shakes, but I can look up verb conjugations and noun meanings in grammars and dictionaries, and when I do I get what you got.
Walk to school and run with a knife?
Lesson for Italian kids: Run to school, but walk with a knife
Thanks!
I don’t get how Philster’s translation would follow from the OP’s given sentence.
What we’ve literally got, AFAICT, is
“the backpack [noun with article] walks [3rd pers sg pres of the verb camminare] at school [a scuola] and [e] the pencil sharpener [noun with article] runs [3rd pers sg pres of the verb correre]”
There’s no word in there meaning “with”, and “corre” can’t be an imperative form.
Sure, if you selectively ignore some of the vocabulary and much of the grammar you can make a sentence mean pretty much anything you want. But I think the goal of translation is to find the meaning that actually fits the given text.
Boy from Mars says the translation is right, but he’s not familiar with it as a saying, and doesn’t think it has a double meaning. He’s from Turin, so it could always be something from the south though.
Your translation is right, but the phrase is meaningless. I’ve lived in Italy for 25 years and have never heard anything like that.
Local sayings are rarely in strict vocabulary and grammar.
There are any number of sayings (and local ones are worst) that don’t translate well. I’d say to stop translating and start understanding what they mean.
I always use ‘voila’ as an example. To me, ‘voila’ is ‘voila’ and there is no translation.
Sorry… didn’t mean to distract anyone here that knows more about literal Italian and translations into English.
I think you guys are missing an obvious point. This is Homework. It’s an exercise for someone learning the language. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be an example of the correct grammar.
Years ago I took an introduction to Japanese course.
lesson 1 - basic description : the [noun] is [adjective]
lesson 2 - lists: [noun] and [noun] and [noun]
lesson 3 - linking clauses: [clause] and [clause]
lesson 4 - either [clause] or [clause];
I had to translate sample sentences from and to Japanese. Things like:
Either the knives and the fish are brave, and the cat is red, or the table is clever, but the airport is tall.
Having worked though hundreds of similar sentences, I am unsurprised by a story about a bag walking to school.
I checked my 1300-page Italian-language dictionary of proverbs, just in case, and no zaino under Z or in the index.
And although a scuola can be “at school,” in can also be “to school,” as in this case (after camminare).
Are you sure you transcribed it correctly? Esp. “zaino”.
Well, speaking as a person who has taught English as a foreign language, I feel pretty confidant in saying that students have a hard time learning gibberish, as opposed to stuff that makes sense. 
Could there be some sort of pun involved?
Something like the equivalent of “my feet walk and my nose runs”