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- Topic: Italian >
- "Chi è la vittima di venerdì?"
68 Comments
1918
Some of the sentences are horrible! I have had 'He cuts himself with a knife' or 'He is ready to die' and even 'the dogs were dying'
Yes, some of these sentences are weird! I'm still wondering why the engineer is in the refrigerator!
When there is a strange sentence like this I usually expect there to be some cultural, idiomatic explanation. Is this an expression in Italian? Does it have some significant political history? For example what day of the week was Mussolini killed, or when did Umberto II lose his crown? Could a native Italian please explain?
Or is the expression commonly used in Italian to refer to Jesus?
One of the translation options is "sacrificial victim" - really scary!!!
Robinson Crusoe's servant! :P
Of course that doesn't work in Italian as it would be capitalized Venerdì.
...I'm not sure if you're joking or not....if you're serious, Friday isn't a person(in this case, anyway). Friday's victim means the victim of the day, Friday
Could be from the tv show big brother, 'who will be voted off this Friday' who will be Friday's victim' you decide.
Arthur...: Good example of a plausible context for a strange sentence. Another along the same lines would be "Survivor" -- maybe from the yet to be announced "Survivor Sicilia"! :-)
My translation "Who is the Friday victim" was rejected by DL. DL's translation makes "Friday" the perpetrator in my way of thinking. Any comments please?
andvalinminster: You could see it that way I suppose, but most natives would take it as the day on which something happened to the victim. That said, your translation expresses the correct idea, though your wording sounds awkward or unnatural.
Germanlehrelsu thanks for your comment. Please note that in English one can use a noun as a adjective. It is in this sense that I translated the phrase the way I did as one might say for instance " here comes the freedom fighter" where both freedom and fighter are both nouns.
- 55
I wrote exactly what I heard, which is what was asked of me, and it was the same as the answer given but it was marked as incorrect. There is no chance to query it now, or to point out the error, because of the new reporting system.
Because the victim ON Friday, was the victim OF Thursday. Look at it as the Italian version of "Who's on first?"
So did I, and have reported it. "Friday's victim" is better, but "victim of Friday" is clumsy English. No Brit would say that except under duress!
Possibly "on Friday" translates to "venerdi" alone. Google doesn't think so - it gives "di venerdi" - but I'd like to hear from a native speaker.
BTW did you know that Google Translate doesn't work from dictionaries and grammars? It is based on statistical analyses of multilingual sources. The more examples it has, the better it gets.
Bad luck mine: "Who is Friday's victim?" is accepted, and so is "Who is the Friday victim?". However "Who is the Friday's victim?" is not...
- 343
out of all the duolingo courses i feel like italian has the darkest sentence examples
Plot twist: maybe there was some heavy drinking on Friday night so the fellows with the worst hangovers are called "victims of Friday"!
Maybe they think a certain fear or shock factor may aid learning. I personally think not.
- 441
As said very early on it can't be a person named Friday because the Italian name of a person would have a capital letter.
Well, "vittima" can be translated as "casualty", which would render the translation "Who is the casualty from Friday?", which would seem to make more sense. Unfortunately, and despite one of the suggested translations being casualty, this was marked as incorrect.
The real question would be were there victims for each of the other days...
Does it occur to anybody else that we should all be much more proficient in Italian if we were only presented with useful sentences that made sense?
- 592
Eh, I'm fine with mostly grammar. While I may never talk about snakes in boots or rice eating spiders, I can work those out to more sensible sentences.
