translation question by brucep 30. Dec 2015
If I said: "Da piccola ero convinto che sarei una cantante," would this have the same meaning as: "Da piccolo ero convinta che avrei fatto la cantante"? | stefano1488 11. Jan 2016
Hello brucep.
The answer is a qualified yes; the qualification depends on the fact that the first sentence is actually wrong, at least in standard usage (I can't remember if, from a strictly grammatical point of view, it would be admissible, and it could in literature).
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/futuro-nel-passato_(La_grammatica_italiana)/
In Italian, the "future in the past" is rendered with the use of the Past Conditional, not of the Present Conditional. That makes a difference with, for example, both English ("as a child I was convinced I would be a singer") and French, among others, in passing.
An Italian would understand the sentence: it is clearly situated in the past and it clearly expresses a conviction about the future; but it would be considered wrong and it would anyway sound weird, unnatural.
"Avrei fatto la cantante" is very good Italian; "sarei stata una cantante" would have been possible, too, but the first alternative sounds more "Italian".
PS Pay attention to the agreement in gender: "da piccola ero convintA che avrei fatto la cantante". After all, you have got the gender right everywhere else ("piccola", "la/una").
Learners of Italian whose mother language is English seem to have a particular difficulty about the agreement in gender; that is not surprising, given that, in English, gender inflexion is much less widespread than in Italian.
PS2 Keep it up! :) |
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