Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 March 1

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March 1

More than one Brazilian real

The Brazilian real (old) was pluralised as "reis" (article says "réis", but File:Brazil 500 Mil Reis Banknote of 1931.jpg depicts it as "reis"), while the Brazilian real (new) and File:Newreal.jpeg both say that the current currency is pluralised as "reais". What's the reason for the difference? Nyttend (talk) 19:35, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not certain about this, but the historic currency unit was the real, which translates into English as "royal". It had the irregular plural reis. The word real in Portuguese is a homonym. There is the name for a currency, and there is also the adjective that translates into English a s "real". This has the regular plural form reais. I believe that the name of the modern Brazilian currency, which was introduced as part of a campaign to stop rampant inflation, is a double entendre. One the one hand, it borrows the name of a historic currency. On the other hand, it is meant to have "real" value, unlike previous currencies whose value dwindled over time. It was an outgrowth of the unidade real de valor. Because of the emphasis on the reality of the new real, its plural followed the model of the adjective meaning "real" in English rather than that of the historic currency. Marco polo (talk) 02:07, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

German-English translation

How do I convert an article based in Germany (German) to English?

Ciwa Griffith is the subject. She was my mentor. I am an American who speaks English — Preceding unsigned comment added by Man from Bear River (talk • contribs) 23:48, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

If you do not speak any German, then one way to do it is to use several machine translators such as translate.google.com to roughly translate it. However, these translators do not usually give good enough English for use directly in Wikipedia. You should then manually create the article itself - checking the results of several of the translators for each paragraph to avoid including any errors from a single translation utility. Finally, you should mark the article with {{cleanup-translation}}, so that someone can later come round and clean up any mistranslations. Once you have created the article, I suggest coming back a day-or-so later, and trying to improve the flow of the English version (without referencing the original). Bluap (talk) 00:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I find that by the time I do all that it would usually have been easier to just write an article in scratch from English sources that I do understand. But if the subject is obscure with few sources outside their native language, it may be the only way. You could also look around English Wikipedia for a German speaker who could help you. Rmhermen (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2015 (UTC)