Spanish Translation
Ella nos dio un regalo.
Does this sentence make any sense? I guess is a poorly translated sentence. What do you think?
You’re right. This sentence pair does not match.
Spanish “regalo” means “gift”. A synonym is “present”. But “present” can also mean “now” as opposed to the future or past. This is what happened here. The temporal “present” translates to “Gegenwart”. But “gift” is meant.
The correct German translation of the Spanish sentence is:
“Sie gab uns ein Geschenk.”
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This is what can happen with 2nd tier translations or when translating via a pivot language (which can result in funny or nonsensical translations like this by google translate).
On tatoeba, usually an english sentence comes first and then translations into other languages are added. Often multiple versions are created - one for every possible interpretation. So as “present” can mean both “Geschenk” and “Gegenwart”, we get two german translations. Now clozemaster comes and takes tatoeba’s database and matches one spanish translation with a german one, and this is what happens.
Except in this case the sentence that came first was not english but french, but french “présent” has the same ambiguity problem as english “present”…
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