Treffpunkt Wolle, which AltaVista helpfully translates as “œmeeting place wants”

I gave you the short version over IM, but again: the translation for Treffpunkt is actually halfway right. Or more precisely, it’s completely right but gives you no context, which makes it half wrong. Treffpunkte (plural) are usually meeting places–that is, the venues where meetings are actually held, like conference rooms–but can also mean something slightly different. The closest equivalent I can come up with is a rendezvous, although stripped of the subtextual and generally sentimental references present in the original French, thankyouverymuch.

Oh, and forget what I told you about Treffpunkt also meaning the meeting itself–I had a brain fart. The Germans, inventively enough, just call those Meetings now.

Anyway, on to the next point, which is what actually motivated me to post in the first place. Wolle is wool. Most of the time. (There’s a saying that uses the word and translates to “come hell or high water” which is totally impossible to translate literally.) It does not mean want, though there is the verb wollen which translates to “to want.”

[geek]
The thing is, if you turn your head sideways and squint some, it is theoretically possible to correctly translate the use of a -e German verb ending as English third person singular under regular German grammar rules. Barely. You’d have to switch moods, and it’s much easier to go from an English subjunctive to a German indicative than the reverse, so it doesn’t happen often. But it is possible.

But again, this only applies to regular grammatical rules. Which really gets my goat about this whole thing is that there is no way that Altavista should have even contemplated changing moods before it considered that wollen is irregularly conjugated. In fact, given that it’s both modal and stem-changing, it could only come up with that if its software was deliberately written to emulate the “translating” skills of a couple of trained monkeys with keyboards. Or a keyboard, singular, which they share simultaneously.
[/geek]

Blech. I feel a little better about this now after getting it all out, but my inner language geek is still crying with despair.

Moral of the story? Be very, very glad that I never pursued a degree in languages and linguistics, as I planned a decade ago. Can you imagine how dense my lectures would be then?