Hey all, I need a favour from someone who can read German and has some time on his or her hands. If you’d be willing to translate something for me, please PM.
Thanks! 
I can read german quite well - but my english isnt very good. If its not too much, I can give it a try.
Cheers Torsten
And if it´s more send one half to Torsten and the other half to me.
Regards
Martin
I can take care of the third half 
.
I can take care of the third half
Good one. Got my first (probably only) out-loud laugh of the day.
Reminds me of one of my son’s first essays: “How to share a pie: Cut the pie in two equal halves. Take the larger half.”
Wow, what an awesome response - thanks everybody! I was a little fried last night when I posted the message and failed to realize the length of the document, so what I think I’ll do is to post the url to the adobe doc here, and let you guys “sign up” for how ever many pages you feel you can handle. If those who offerred wouldn’t mind grabbing a small chunk and posting “I’ll do page n” (or n through (n+n)), it would spread out the workload and be a huge assistance to me.
I think the “description” is the key part, but I obviously can’t tell myself…
Thanks a tonne, all!
Khai, are you kidding us? It´s a technical manual about som kind of ethernet stuff full of strange words I´ve never seen before. And seven pages! Sorry, but I can´t help you. I don´t even understand half of the words in german so there is no way I could translate them to english.
Regards
Martin
I tried to download the doc, but can only see the first page, which is legal stuff about a patent.
But if it’s as technical as Martin describes, sorry bud I’m not your man. I though it would be tri related.
I don´t even understand half of the words in german
You only said you would do half! Are you backing out?
Do you speak German?
I know a little German.
I know a little German too.
…
There he is over there!
That, my friends, is funny.
sorry for being a quitter. To my defence I must say that I´m no longer a german.
Regards
Martin, Birkerød, Nordsjælland, Denmark - right next to Sweden
Oops - sorry guys, I swear it never even dawned on me that you’d all be expecting something tri related, or that the technical nature of the document would be intimidating. (A well thought out plan, this was. ;))
Anyway, if anyone is still interested in taking a stab at it, I have someone covering the first 2 of the 7 pages. If you have some free time and nothing to do, or just feel like helping me out, I’d appreciate it greatly.
For those of you who are unwilling/able to help given the technical nature of the doc, that’s cool too. I appreciate that you tried.
Khai,
I grew up in Germany and while I still consider myself fluent in the language, this kind of very technical translating is extremely hard and I believe only specialists in that field can do such work.
Basically the average German speaker rarely uses terms like this, nor do most native English speakers ever use the versions thereof. (Legal lingo combinded with computer lingo)
Does that make sense?
Sorry to not give you a more positive response.
Herbert
I´m no longer a german.
Where have we heard THAT before
This makes perfect sense Herbert, and the reason that it never occurred to me that it might be a problem is because I lack that wholeheartedly. I guess if one were fluent in either technical or legal jargon as well as the German language, then the challenge would not be so difficult - but to the average layman who is fluent in neither, this would pose quite the challenge indeed.
I appreciate the effort, and the explanations as to why this is no simple task.
OK, now I’m really interested. What in all HELL are you trying to have translated over there?! Could somebody at least translate a sentence or two and put it here? Are you trying to build a new German internet activated nuclear, and have it be done in accordance with international law?
first post, hope i can contribute with something
have you tried this translator
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
i don’t know if it’s that technical, couldn’t mark the text in the pdf…
It’s a German patent regarding the “method and design of transparent switching of data transmissions between data processing equipment such as an appropriate software product and an appropriate machine-readable storage medium.”
I can only open the first page, as well, and I haven’t fully translated more than the intro line, but it appears to be a method of allowing more than one computer to write to a single networked drive without address/data conflict. …and “appropriate” may not be the appropriate word in English, I’m a bit rusty.
And, yeah, seven pages of patent law is a bi*** to translate in a hurry. Although, it could only be 3-4 pages of text and 3-4 pages of associated artwork, if German patents use the same form as American patents.