Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 May 14

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May 14

Latin translation request

"Sed tincidunt pretium ligula, non varius erat"

"Vivamus sed fermentum tellus. Donec quis elit sapien. Aliquam commodo tortor nisi, nec varius mi finibus at. In nulla libero, dictum vel orci at, congue."

Google translated most of the words from the first sentence, except "ligula", which I would guess was a typo of "lingula", meaning "tongue". Since this is the motto of a restaurant (see their web page here), that would seem to make sense. But, even with that change, Google still gives me gibberish:

"However, developers price of your tongue, there was a casino"

I'm guessing the meaning is something along the lines of "If you value your tongue, you will value your restaurant". Can an expert give me their translation of this first sentence, and perhaps the rest ?

Thanks, SinisterLefty (talk) 15:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

It's a form of Lorem ipsum. Neither of the passages have any real meaning in Latin. (If you look here, for instance, you'll see the second bit used multiple times under "Album Reviews".) Deor (talk) 16:23, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's placeholder text; they haven't gotten round to replacing it with the final copy.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:09, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. SinisterLefty (talk) 17:18, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

SinisterLefty, maybe this is a Latin translation of colorless green ideas sleep furiously :-) Nyttend (talk) 23:44, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Nope, it's not... AnonMoos (talk) 05:11, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Jokes don't need you to agree or disagree with them. That's not the purpose of a joke. --Jayron32 12:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

The two paragraphs at the beginning of this section conspicuously lack any single word which could plausibly translate English "colorless", "green", "idea", "to sleep", or "furious(ly)", so the attempted "joke" seems kind of stupid to me. AnonMoos (talk) 17:21, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

I think Nyttend was jocularly using hyperbole to suggest that the Latin text might be grammatically correct yet semantically nonsensical, in the same way that 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously' is. I doubt Nyttend meant this suggestion to be taken seriously, still less that the Latin literally does translate as 'c g i s f', but it certainly caused me to chuckle. Chacun à son goût (to quote a phrase well known in English which is actually not the form correctly used in French).

Perhaps we should re-establish the informal practice of using small text to denote jokes, to avoid confusing those with less-than-native English and/or a sense of humour deficiency. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.2.132 (talk) 01:51, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Don't want to come across as grimly humorless, but a joke usually needs some type of minimal grounding in reality, or reference to something outside of itself, in order to be humorous -- otherwise it's just day-dream free-associating or pure surrealism... AnonMoos (talk) 04:30, 22 May 2019 (UTC)