Neither. Google is one of the programs which tries to use “whole sentence” translation as much as possible: when you use Google Translation to translate a webpage, you can provide corrections. These and other pairs are stored in their translator program’s database and pulled up. In this way, a sentence which might have originally have been translated into Spanish as “estás aquí” (informal and with the subject ellided, which would be the general grammatical rule and the way someone speaking out loud would be most likely to say it) gets corrected to “usted está aquí” (further from the usual rule, but what’s actually customary on maps).
The algorithms for these programs will try to divide long sentences into smaller fragments and search for translations for those fragments, as well as having rules for how to combine the fragments so that you keep agreement between different parts of the sentence, have the right connectors, etc.
Older translation programs use rule-based translation: they have word pairs stored and rules on how to combine them. These will say “estás aquí” unless someone from their own team has added that line to the list of exceptions.
My experience is that these tend to be bad at dealing with words that have more than one meaning (so pretty much the majority) and also tend to be worse at getting agreement right. For example, translating the wikipedia page for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero from “foreigner” to Spanish using Google treated his wife’s gender correctly most of the time, whereas using one of the other programs used male adjectives and the male singular pronoun for her :smack::smack::smack: (I say “from foreigner” because I used several original languages, not just one).
In Italian, I would say “tu stai qui” (informal) or “lei sta qui” (formal). You’ve used conjugated the term “essere” which denotes a more permanent sense of the term “to be,” when you should be using the impermanent “stare.” I hope I’m explaining this right. Essere vs stare is similar to ser vs estar in Spanish, if that helps at all.
Italian checking in. I would use “Voi siete qui”. Using “tu” is a bit too informal, but in the end it really depends on your target audience (older/younger, groups/singles, official business/fun).
In Italian “stare” has an implicit continuity so if I say “Io sto qui” (that I would translate as “I’m staying here”) I mean than I’m here and I intend/need to stay here for some time. The other main meaning for “stare” is living, so saying “Io sto qui” pointing to a map means “that’s where I’m living right now” not “I am here”.
Also note that “Tu stai qui/Voi state qui” without context, or with an exclamation mark, can be interpreted as the imperative “You must stay here”.
I hope this help, if you need more information I really need to go find my grammar.
Paranoid guy walks into shopping mall, looks at map. Reads: “You are here.” Suddenly sweats and shakes, looks around and says: “Geez, how do they know that?”:eek:
Isn’t it the other way around? “Essere” suggests continuity? I would say, for example, “Sono una ragazza” and would say “Sto felice.” But I guess I should say “sono qui” as opposed to “sto qui”? Okay.
Edit: I also noticed you’ve been here for years, and are finally posting. “Welcome” might not be the correct term, so uhh, “Hi”?
Actually while you might have heard somebody say “Sto Felice” it’s a Southern Italy regionalism and it’s not correct in Italian.
Let me see if I can sort this out.
If you’re speaking about being in a place “stare” means that it’s prolonged in time or denotes something that is “usually so”. “La città sta sulla collina” (the city is on the hill), “La tigre sta nella foresta” (the tiger lives in the forest). If you say “La penna sta sul tavolo” (the pen is on the table) you strongly imply that you should be able to find the pen on the desk because it’s where it usually is. OTH if you say “La penna è sul tavolo” you’re simply saying that it’s there, and it’s actually the most used form.
If you’re speaking about somebody emotions or physical state the rule of thumb is “essere” before nouns and adjectives and “stare” before adverbs. So you’ll have “Sono felice”, “Sono triste”, “Sono alto”, “Sto bene”, “Sto male” (I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m tall, I’m fine, I’m sick).
As usual there are exceptions, for instance “I’m comfortable on this chair” can be translated as “Sto comodo su questa sedia” as well as “Sono comodo su questa sedia” and it means exactly the same thing.
Anyway to get back to your other question: I would say “Sono qui” when asked “Where are you?”, and I would say “Sto qui” if I need to say “I’m staying”. For instance I’m in the office and everybody is leaving and they ask “Are you coming?” and I need to say “No, I’m staying here”: “Vieni via?”, “No, sto qui”.
So as the map is really answering the “Where am I?”/“Where are we?” questions the best answers are “Tu sei qui”/“Voi siete qui”.
The Latvian is also often written as: Jūs atrodaties šeit. Formal “you” and similar to the “Sie befinden sich hier” (“You find yourself(ves) here”) posted by constanze.
Thank you everyone who has posted on this thread. The international flavour of this board is impressive - we only missed czech, estonian, greek, maltese, polish, romanian, slovak and slovene out of the list. I’ll go with google translate on those, since it proved fairly accurate otherwise. Plus, I am not expecting visitors with those languages
