> Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.)

Of course there are differences, but both Dutch and English are West Germanic languages (descended from proto-Germanic) whereas Portuguese is a Romance language (descended from Latin).

Here is a handy tree showing how various languages are related to each other:

https://d1sjtleuqoc1be.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

Very valuable insight - I am sure the Dutch speaker you’re informing had no idea what Romance languages are

Such a tree mostly describes word similarity. But translating words is not what an AI (or more generally a computer) has problems with.

It's word ordering and idioms where AIs stand or fall. Things that show very little correlation in the evolution of language.

> Such a tree mostly describes word similarity.

It describes genetic descent.

Yoda was Dutch?

He does live in a swamp, so he could be an ancestor

Translation or transliteration?

No transliteration: Dutch uses the Latin alphabet.

Thanks, I didn’t realize that I’ve been using that word incorrectly. I should have said ‘literal translation’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation

Maybe word for word translation is the phrase we're looking for? As opposed to an idiomatic translation. Transliteration means phonetically translating from one alphabet to another, in order to p reserve the pronunciation.

Exactly this — I thought that’s what “transliteration” meant, but I was wrong. I appreciate the pointer.