Need help with tr*nsl*t**n!

[ScotiaBalach]

Halò
Ciamar a tha sibh an-diugh?
Can someone tr*nsl*t*:
"I wander on, over hill and glen"
for me please?

(It's for a song I'm in the process of writing)

[Seonaidh]

Well, Boy Alba, first, try l00king it up here:-

http://www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php

Then come back with your attempt and mevvies somebody will, if needs be, correct it.

[ScotiaBalach]

Well, here's my attempt:

Mi seachrain air, seachad aonach agus gleann.
I wander on, over hill and glen

I'm sure it's terrible, due to my poor knowledge of Gàidhlig grammar.

[Seonaidh]

Eau quai, then...

Mi seachrain air, seachad aonach agus gleann.
I wander on, over hill and glen

a) it would be more usual to stick the verb before the subject in Gaelic (as, indeed, is done in English when asking a question). So, if you want to use "wander" as the actual verb, rather than, e.g., put down the equivalent of "I am wandering" (where "am" is the actual verb), you'll have to stick it before the "mi". So, for "I wander", you could have, e.g.

Seachrainidh mi
Tha mi a' seachran
Thèid mi air seachran
Tha mi a' dol air seachran

- or, indeed, you could use something else for the "seachran-ain" bit: loads of alternatives given in yon Briathrachas thingie - try selecting them, one by one, then seeing how the Gaelic translates to English to decide which one "feels" best for your porpoises.

As for "I wander on", what does "on" mean here? I suspect the intention is not such as "I wander on top of", but more "I wander onwards". For this, you would really need something like "air adhart" instead of plain old "air".

As for "over", try "thairis". "Seachad" is more in the nature of "leftover", I think!

"Hill and glen" - yes, could be. I might favour a different "hill" word, e.g. "cnoc", "beinn" or "monadh", depending on what sort of hill you had in mind.

Now, if this is a bit of a poem, you might well be concerned with such matters as scansion and rhyming. In other words, I might come up with a pretty fair tronslotion for you, e.g.

Thèid mi air seachran air adhart, thairis cnoc is gleann

- but it might totally ruin the poem's scansion etc.

The English line quoted does not seem to be over-reliant on such things as alliteration (e.g. "Many mice make mincemeat of Mozzarella") and, indeed, alliteration is not often a feature of English poetry (though you do find it on occasion). However, it is far more a feature of various types of Celtic poetry (as in the snippet "Y ddraig goch ddyry gychwyn", showing answering consonants dd-r-g-ch in each half-line).

You have to remember that, in the Oral Tradition, you needed lots of aides memoire, of the type furnished by rigorous alliteration and relentless metre. Consider, for instance:-

Y llynedd gyda'r llanw - y tynnodd
Dros y tonnau garw:
Dros ei wlad y rhoes ei lw,
Dros for fe droes i farw.

Leni haedda lonyddwch - ei fwyn hun
Fan honno mewn heddwch:
Ar wely'r llawr treulia'r llwch
Nadolig ei dawelwch.

(a Welsh poem, "Mab ei Dad", to commemorate the death of a soldier in WW1). That poem is an example of "englyn", which keeps a mathematically strict system of "cynghanedd" (assonance between consonants) and rhyme. Now, I know exactly what it means - each and every word, combination of words, nuance etc - and could certainly render it into English. But it would lose all its qualities of craftsmanship if I did so, as English is not a language suited to that style of poetry.

So, what we've just done here - tronsloting one line of an English poem into Gaelic - is probably not worth the e-paper it's e-printed on. In all probability, no matter how well we craft our tronslotion, the essential spark of the original remains beyond us. This, of course, is one reason why learning other languages is such a valuable thing to do.