Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Er is sprake van / er is geen sprake van

An easy way to translate these correctly is "it's a matter of" and "it's not a matter of."

Er is spraken van een vergissing = "One could call it a mistake." In other words, somebody blew it but I want to use passive language that avoids saying exactly who.

Er is geen spraken van een vergissing = "It was definitely not a mistake." In other words, it looks like a mistake to many observers, but the speaker wants to deny it.

It's a lot like the French "question," which can also be found in English, and is used in the sense of 'issue.' As in: "it's a question of right and wrong." and "there can be no question of him being temporarily insane."

As an editorial remark, I find the idiom strangely annoying in Dutch. Its use is confined mostly to politicians.

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Explainer

I use this space as a brain dump, almost a note pad.
Lots of English translations of Dutch information, especially if I think something could also be useful for others. For speed I start with Google translate and then put on finishing touches myself.
*Use at your own risk.*