Hello Keth,

> I think Haukur has a very good point here.
> As I understand it, he is saying that Americans (or others of the
> English tongue), when the want to find an Icelandic Or Old Norse
> word, simply scan the dictionary

That's not what I was saying :-) Or at least I didn't
mean that those sorts of translations were especially
characteristic of English speakers. The same thing can
happen to speakers of any language with insufficient
knowledge of the language they are trying to translate
into.

Here's one story.

An Icelander wants to translate "Hver á þennan frakka?"
(Who has this coat?) into English. He uses the dictionary:

hver - hot spring
á - river
þessi - this
frakki - Frenchman

So he gets

"Hot spring river this Frenchman?"

which is not very helpful.

Dictionaries are useful tools but one has to know how
to use them. They are not sufficient for translating
sentences into languages one doesn't know. There is not a
one-to-one correspondance between the words and grammar
of any two languages.

Kveðja,
Haukur