let's ask google with the trans shell:

$ trans Geschlecht >1.geschl
$ cat 1.geschl 
Geschlecht

gender

Definitions of Geschlecht
[ Deutsch -> English ]

noun
    gender
        Geschlecht, Genus
    sex
        Sex, Geschlecht, Geschlechtsverkehr, Liebe
    race
        Rennen, Rasse, Lauf, Wettlauf, Geschlecht, Wettrennen
    lineage
        Abstammung, Geschlecht, Geblüt

Geschlecht
    gender, sex
$
[download]

I have been telling the etymology of Geschlechtsverkehr wrong for 30 or more years now. Geschlechtsteileverkehr would have to have been the word for my interpretation of "genital-traffic" to be right. The occasion to be wrong in so public a place as an on-line coding monastery has led me to wonder about the error's genesis in my mind. It comes from scene 23 of holy grail. The french are taunting the english in the comic reality of the film. (I don't have a nationalistic bone in my body and regard it as mankind's measles.) I translated it into the german I was taking in high school. What I recall about the time was that we were looking at a different way of forming the possessive. The taunt was:

and my translation was:

and this was to be in the stead of

What's it called when you use the dative or the reflexive instead of mein/sein etc., in particular with body parts?

(hoping to nudge us into a perl way out of this subject matter) Is there a perl way to get something like the male possessive pronoun in the top ten-used languages? e.g. sein, his, его

Finally, in all the shell redirection I did trying to figure out encodings and languages, I got this output, which I think is funny, somewhat like the original bit:

$ file *
1.ascii.plI wave my private parts at your aunties: ASCII text, with es
+cape sequences
1.de.txt:                                          ASCII text, with es
+cape sequences
1.de.utf8.txt:                                     ASCII text, with es
+cape sequences
1.file:                                            ISO-8859 text
...
[download]

    race
        Rennen, Rasse, Lauf, Wettlauf, Geschlecht, Wettrennen
[download]

This is mingling two different meanings, one of which doesn't relate to the main lemma:

    race
        (heritage) Rasse, Geschlecht
        (contest) Rennen, Lauf, Wettlauf, Wettrennen
[download]

(see also wiktionary). Such constellations occur frequently, so you might want to apply these look-ups recursively.

For the translation of that sentence, the "private parts" part is OK, but I would translate to wave not with winken, but with wedeln. However, that'd be more ontopic at languagemonks ;-)

> I wave my private parts at your aunties

You are trying to translate broken English into correct German, while staying funny? :)

I agree with Soonix that "to wave" is better translated as "wedeln" (= to waggle) in this context, but I'm still struggling to translate it literally while keeping all subtexts ...

I looked up the way they translated it in the dubbed version and they say

"Ich wedele mit meinen Schwanzfedern euch Tünten zu."

which is

"I'm waggling with my tail feathers towards you nancies." + some typical French errors.

(Please note that "Tanten" means aunts / "Tunten" means nancies ... Tünten would be a way to reflect the French accent.)

As you see they changed some translation to make more sense.

Like another added line with a lot of recent actuality is "We will never let you enter the European Community ... "

Would be interesting to look up the French dubbed version now, couldn't find it yet. A version with French subtitles was also pretty free to keep it funny.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}