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Wed 26 Sep, 2012 04:40 pm
Hello all, I'm JackJack86 and I'm in the process of writing a song with a line in Yiddish but my understanding of the Mother Tongue is left to only a few words that I've learned from my now very Americanized family.
The line I'm trying to translate is "However, folk will believe anything in the hope for a silver spoon." I went ahead and put it into a online translator which gave me this, "ober folk vel gleybn abi vos inem hofn oyf a zilber lefl," which sounds alright to me but I want to get the grammar just right.
Also, given this translation I decided to ditch "ober" which I think means "however" in this context. My reason for this is the line is two syllables too long.
@JackJack86,
There are other syllables in that sentence which are more superfluous than ober. I would translate it as: Ober mentshn veln gleybn alts tomer a zilbernem lefl. If you want your original sentence to be grammatically correct, you need to make the following changes: veln, not vel (folk is plural). Vos inem is a weird construction - I would change that to farn (for the). Since lefl here is in the dative, it should be zilbernem lefl. My suggestion is a bit less literal - it means something closer to "However, people will believe anything in case of a silver spoon", which means essentially the same thing you are trying to imply.
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