On the "translation challenge" tag: Meant for sentences that are particularly difficult to translate due to play on words, proverbial elements, or unique cultural influences and/or slang.

Actually, I'm going to take personal ownership of this challenge. Anyone who can put forth a good translation of this sentence will have a sentence dedicated to their accomplishment :-)

is this open for translation into ANY language?

>perverb [tag]
intended pun?

Yes, it is. But it is not a perverb!

It's a reference to this: http://tatoeba.org/sentence_com...07744#comments

Do they refer to a penis when they are talking about "a friend in hand"?

何。。。？

@deniko you're watching too much tv :P...'a friend in hand' is a play on 'a bird in hand' which would mean 'something that's gauranteed' or 'something that you have for sure'...

Yea, you guys are the perverbs...

@saeb: please remove the perverb tag...

The best way to translate this would probably be to translate "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush" (into the proper equivalent), and then replace "bird" (or its equivalent), with "friend". This might not be possible with every language, which is why I marked it as a challenge.

it's gone :O...but it wasn't mine though...

:) Guys, I recognized the original proverb ("A bird..."). I just wanted to translate it into Russian (something like "Лучше друг в руке, чем журавль в небе"), and I thought that many people would think that this "friend in the hand" as a penis. So I wondered whether the same word play was intented in the English sentence.

"Лучше друг в руке, чем друг в небе" would work, IMO.

@deniko: I don't think that meaning is implied in the english^^

(yeah that XXX tag needs to go)

@FeuDRenais
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/509415
if this checks out, you owe me another one for japanese :P (but make it funny this time)

@FeuDRrenais
I accept your challenge :P
http://tatoeba.org/spa/sentences/show/509590

> (but make it funny this time)

What am I, a clown? :-)

> Do they refer to a penis...
You’ve made my day!

> it's gone :O...but it wasn't mine though...
It was mine, and I do believe it’s a perverb.

> Yes, it is. But it is not a perverb!
Why not? See ‘perverb’ in Wikipedia[1] and examples there (The road to Hell wasn’t paved in a day, slaughter is the best medicine). This is 100% a perverb.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverb

People who do not know what a "perverb" is (most native speakers), will assume that it is a perverted proverb. However, perversion is a word rarely used outside of the XXX context, in my opinion. But yea, I suppose it's a perverb.

But why is the XXX back? This is not XXX.

And why are we using footnotes now? Since when did comments become research reports?

> People who do not know what a "perverb" is (most native speakers)
> will assume that it is a perverted proverb.
Hardly a reason not to use the tag.

Most Russian native speakers wouldn’t understand a single tag here. Is it a reason to stop taggins Russian sentences?

> And why are we using footnotes now? Since when did comments become
> research reports?
I’ve been using these for links in Tatoeba for some time alteady. You can’t put a link in brackets, for than the closing bracked will be considered a part of the link. But footnotes allow to embed a link in the text[*].

[*] And the other reason is that footnotes are cool.

http://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/1964472

It might be good to check some of these translations... I've a feeling that this sentence has fallen into complete chaos.

The Spanish ones are OK.

It's just that... I'm not even sure what the English sentence means anymore.

I'm not sure about the "proverb" tag; I think we should reserve that for established proverbs.