"A menina responde com inteligência."
Translation:The girl responds with intelligence.
17 Comments
A more natural way to say it would be 'intelligently', but duolingo didn't accept that...
Devil's advocate mode on. I am not saying that it shouldn't be accepted, but imagine you are translating a book and you come across this sentence. You know that the author could have written "A menina responde inteligentemente" but chose not to. To preserve the nuance the author was looking for, that sentence and the one the author wrote deserve different translations into English I believe.
I disagree! I would translate them both identically. Saying they 'should' have different translations seems to be an argument in favour of literal translations rather than natural ones.
Fair enough, welcome to the "lost hearts club" :-)
Literal and natural are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As it is not so obvious to me that the two translations do indeed convey exactly the same meaning, my argument is that there is no compelling reason to search for a less direct translation (even if it should be accepted too) when the literal version already works.
Hah, thanks!
I think my version sounds more natural, but happy to agree to disagree :)
I don't disagree, and that's part of my point, the author could have chosen your version in Portuguese too, but decided against it. I have no reason to believe, yet at least, that "com inteligência" is always preferred over "inteligentemente", but if it is then I concede the point.
Anyway, it is certainly true that the literal translation is less popular than yours, although it is far from unused:
But the meaning is different. You can respond with intelligence, if there is a challenge to overcome. This is how I understand the Portuguese sentence. Correct me please, if I am mistaken here.
Or you can answer intelligently (give an intelligent response), if you are interviewed. So just looking at the number of occurrences on the internet will not tell you if a certain translation is acceptable or not, because the other meaning might just be more common.
I disagree, because many, many times the English translation is NOT a word for word rendering, but a colloquial and natural one. "...with intelligence" sounds pedantic and contrived.
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Sure, but it's not accepting the natural English. The Portuguese seems fine, based on my Spanish (in which i used to be an interpreter).
But for the purpose of LEARNING this language, to tell us that "intelligently" is wrong is not helpful. It's doubtful that any of us could learn the subtleties of any language with a course like this one. That skill requires years of immersion in either the written or oral language. For the purpose of being understood, or understanding what is written, "intelligently" is certainly NOT incorrect. At the end of the day, no-one is going to be able to read Portuguese literature after exposure to this course.
