In the trailer for the anime “Those Who Hunt Elves”, there’s a magic symbol with the following French inscription:
What does this mean?
According to AltaVista, “Obeissez has your superieurs and them soye. Subjected because they there take guard.” 
Maybe it’s in Basque. 
If it had translated one or two more words, I might have been able to interperet something from it. “Obsession had you superiors and your superiors have you,” perhaps?
Do you happen to know what the magic symbol and inscription were used for in the movie? It might help if we understand what the spell is supposed to describe.
Ranchoth
The reason AltaVista can’t translate some of the words is because the accent marks are missing. When you add those back in, the first part means, “Obey your superiors,” but the rest is still unclear.
Ahhh… nothing like cracking open Le petit Robert first thing in the morning to get you invigorated for another hot mid-Missouri day…
“Obey your superiors and … toast them? Obedient because they make sure of it.” I’m having trouble with “et leur soye” because I’m not quite sure how to translate “soyer”, defined in LpR as “to go from sorbet to champagne”.
“Obey your superiors and ???. Submit because they are wise to your tricks.” Would be the best translation I could come up with.
“soye” must be a mispelling of something. I haven’t found a verb “soyer” in my Larousse or my Harrap’s English-French. It is the archaic form of “soie” – which can mean “silk,” “spider silk,” or a technical term for a part of a knife, the “tang.”
“leur” can mean “their” or “to them,” or just “them” depending on the context.
Forgot to ask, slight hijack – how is “Those Who Hunt elves?” I wasn’t impressed with the one episode I saw, but maybe it gets better…?
But “soumis” is the past participle of soumettre - it’s not the imperative, at least in the present tense. And a correction from my other post - “soyer” is not a verb, it’s a noun, so that’s off. Hrm…
:smack:
(How the hell did I miss that…)
Which makes my whole elegant translation a mess.
“Obedient because they are wary of it/them/etc…” would be better.
“soye” is actually “soyez” and it’s indeed a verb : the imperative form of the verb “etre” (to be). “prendre garde” means to pay a lot of attention to something.
The translation would be :
“Obey to your superiors and submit to them because they pay attention to that”, or somesuch…
Obey your superiors and their kind. Submit to them, because they’re keeping watch (or “are on guard”).
clairobscur’s right – it makes perfect sense if the period becomes a “z.” Maybe it’s just hard to see in the original image?
Cat Fight, I’m curious where you get “kind.” In that case, I would have thought it would be “sorte,” not “soye.”
<Sabaru Sumeragi>“These old spell books are full of mistakes. They even misspelled the most important word.” </Subaru Sumeragi>