Google Translate gives me oracion— oration. A nice word but I don’t think it’s correct. How would you say, “the priest says a prayer during Mass”?
Also, do you guys have a placeholder word for an object whose name you don’t know? I’m English we would say a “gizmo” or a “doohickey” or something. As in, the mechanic tells his coworker, “hand me that doohickey there.”
Oración is correct. Synonyms: rezo, plegaria, jaculatoria, rogativa, preces, azalá, invocación, deprecación, súplica. It may be confusing that the word oración also means sentence (like phrase: subject, verb, object, not the verdict of a jury).
There are many placeholders, you can say for instance, el comosellame, (the whateveritiscalled) or el nosequé (the idontknowwhat) or el coso ese (that thingy there). I guess there will be a great regional variance on those, South America being so big and diverse. Those examples were from Spain.
Another whatchamacallit word is chingadera. I think it’s mostly in Mecico and the U.S.
Not to be used in polite company though. It’s based on chingar, the equivalent of the f word in English.
You have several options:
El sacerdote ora durante la homilía.
El cura reza durante la misa.
El padre dice una plegaria durante la prédica.
El capellán ruega en misa.
El clérigo soltó su sermón.
El pastor se dirigió a su rebaño invocando un ser imaginario.
I doubt Google would suggest the last two, but they feel correct to me.
‘Rezar’ is the verb I learned for ‘to pray’.
Yes, that too, with some synonyms of which several have other meanings too:
To pray: rezar, orar, rogar, invocar, adorar.
Prayer: oración, rezo, plegaria, jaculatoria, rogativa, preces, azalá, invocación, deprecación, súplica (see link in post #2).
I don’t know Spanish, but from my Catholic school days, I remember that Oremus is “let us pray,” and Ora pro nobis is “pray for us,” so pretty closely related.
In modern Spanish it’s oremos and ora por nosotros, respectively.
I think it’s cool that the word has been almost identical for more than two-thousand years.
The only thing I would add is “El coso del cosito” (The thing of the thingy) famously asked for in hardware stores, to the point that many hardware stores have signs to the tune of “If you need a new coso for your cosito, please bring the old one so we can know what kind of coso are we talking about”
Or vice-versa as in this case:
ETA: While looking for that image in google, I found another word for “doohickey”: “Chirimbolo”
Spanish speakers can sometimes understand entire phrases in ancient latin, depending on the words used.
For example in Civilization V, Agustus says:
“Salve. Augustus sum, imperator et pontifex Maximus romae”
Which is clearly “Saludos, Augusto soy, emperador y pontifice maximo (de) Roma”.
(“Hail, Augustus I am, Imperator and pontifex maximum of Rome”)
And in civ VI Trajan says:
“ave viator. augustae romae imperator caesar traianus sum. quis es? qua terra patria vocas?”
Again in Spanish:
“Ave, viajero, Augusto y Emperador (de) Roma Cesar Trajano soy, Quien eres?, Cual tierra es la patria vuestra?”
(“Hail, voyager, Agustus and Emperor of Rome, Caesar Trajan I am, Who are you? What’s your homeland?”)
As a Spanish speaker I had no trouble understanding those phrases because the words and grammar in those specific examples have not changed much in 2000 years.
However something like Cicero’s:
“Quae cum ita sint, Catilina, perge, quo coepisti, egredere aliquando ex urbe; patent portae; proficiscere. Nimium diu te imperatorem tua illa Manliana castra desiderant. Educ tecum etiam omnes tuos, si minus, quam plurimos; purga urbem. Magno me metu liberabis, dum modo inter me atque te murus intersit.”
Is practically unintelligible.
Maybe because Cicero was a native Latin speaker, and the guys who wrote Civilization V aren’t? 
That certainly plays a part, but I think is mostly that the Civ examples are simple introductory phrases while Cicero was famously convoluted even in his own time.
A teacher collected the bestest and interestingest answers to the questions he posed in his exams under the title “Antología del disparate” which was a great success in Spain in the '70s. I still remember this, because it was so good:
Translate “Ave, Cesar, morituri te salutant” into Spanish.
Answer: Las aves del César murieron por falta de salud.
(“Caesar’s birds died for lack of health”)
Yes, you have to apply a bit of discernment when “vibe translating” from Latin and beware of false friends.
As a 72 yar old English chap, I’ve used ‘gizmo’ (for devices) and ‘thingummy’ (for everything else), but never ‘doohickey’…
Speaking of false friends, oracion in Spanish and oration in English is a good example.
Of course, the most laughed about false pair is embarazada / embarrassed.
A similar, English-German false friend pair is pregnant/prägnant.
I speak just enough Spanish to get me in trouble - a LOT of it I picked up on the soccer field. My best friend’s mom was Mexican, and when I calmly asked about “that pinche chingadera over there”, she was shocked. My friend thought it was hilarious.
Languages are hard: embarazoso, -a means embarrasing, embarazada (no masculine form on that one, although grammar does not forbid it) on the other hand means pregnant, which, as Einsteinshund rightly remarks, is not the same as prägnant. False Friends can be funny. My colleagues made that page!
I agree with your friend.
That’s great! Any chance you and your friends setting up an English-German false friends site?