Original text - Romanian - măi, de ce eşti drăguţ?

This can have two meanings, but one is less probable:

The most probable: hey, why are you being nice (to me)?
The less probable: hey, why are you cute?

*măi = is a Romanian specific way of calling someone, like "Hey, you".

What do we do with it, Francky? No one translated it so far, I think it's either because of not knowing how to put "măi" în French (this would be my case ) or because of the more or less uncertain meaning...

The requester isn't Romanian, so it's useless to ask him about the meaning. Another "weak" point here.

CC: Francky5591

You did well translating it, even if there are two possibilities in the translation, as when I read it, I thought it was meaning "where are you from, dear?" (but my Romanian is VERY bad)

Yeah, first translation is weird but this kind of question can be asked someone. The second one is some kind of silly question "WHY are you cute?" (the only answer is certainly : "because!"

So IMO we can translate using the first version you gave, and skip the second one (forget it)


If the requester does not understand Romanian, maybe we should translate with the translation that makes the more sense (1st one), that would be" Hé toi! pourquoi es-tu [si] sympa [avec moi]?

You can translate it if you want, just leave the longer version (with words between [ ]) in the remarks field and use "Hé toi! Pourquoi es-tu sympa?"

Done! Thank you!

I understand French quite well, but I stopped studying it in the 12th grade, some 5 years ago. I was quite good at it, so my skills aren't lost, though now I am quite embarassed when translating into foreign languagues because well, I think it's that uncertainty when you translate into a foreign language and you know only the standard language which can't be used always in collocvial language. But when I am totally sure you can be sure I will translate no matter the foreign language.

That's a good point translating only when you're totally sure!

About colloquial and literary French, there's a huge difference, but I guess in many languages it goes the same. And at school pupils are led to be more familiar to the literary language than to the colloquial one (that is much widely spoken and even written).

I personally don't complain about this (pupils learning a language through its literature), as it is better when the basic grammatical and syntaxic rules are mastered, which isn't always possible using only the colloquial way of speaking (eg : interrogative form will often be expressed the same way as an affirmative form in the colloquial spoken language, and only the tone will show it's interrogative.)

As for texts we can see here, we have a lot of chat messages that require more knowledge about the colloquial way of speaking than we have literary texts. Moreover literary texts are often considered homework and we consequently don't translate them, which is a fine ethic to apply here, but a bit of misery for the translators at the same time!

Sometimes there are two different languages and one name for them.