What does this mean?

[Bert45]

Cloister with prune in Santa Maria la Real monastery, Najera, La Rioja, Spain.​

There are several images under this heading here: https://www.alamy.com/cloister-with...ery-najera-la-rioja-spain-image425869403.html
I'm guessing that 'prune' has been translated from the Spanish, but what word in Spanish? The first image is of the cloister with a well (pozo) in the foreground. Can pozo mean prune?
Thanks.

 

[C clearly]

Well, it does say that captions are provided by the contributors. Maybe you could compare all the photos under that heading to see what the common features are. Are you thinking of buying the photo, or are you just looking for puzzles?

 

[Bert45]

C Clearly asked: Are you thinking of buying the photo, or are you just looking for puzzles?
I was just looking for pictures of the monastery of Santa María la Real.

 

[Rick of Rick and Peg]

I believe the prune is a mistranslation of palm tree.
The translator must have confused a palm tree with a plum tree; both words are four letters long, three of which are identical and in the same order.
The English plum tree is ciruelo in Spanish.
Ciruela is Spanish for the fruit, plum.
The English prune is ciruela pasa in Spanish.

BTW, I think your questions about the three Blancas at the monastery has been solved.

 

[Pelegrin]

I believe the prune is a mistranslation of palm tree.
The translator must have confused a palm tree with a plum tree.
The English plum tree is ciruelo in Spanish.
Ciruela is Spanish for the fruit, plum.
The English prune is ciruela pasa in Spanish.

In Spanish " pruno" is another word for "ciruelo" but is only used for the red one.

 

[Blue Tang]

Given that the caption is in English, it may be a truncated reference to the "pruned palm." (Which appears in need of another pruning.)

 

[Bert45]

I believe the prune is a mistranslation of palm tree.
The translator must have confused a palm tree with a plum tree; both words are four letters long, three of which are identical and in the same order.
The English plum tree is ciruelo in Spanish.
Ciruela is Spanish for the fruit, plum.
The English prune is ciruela pasa in Spanish.

BTW, I think your questions about the three Blancas at the monastery has been solved.

Thanks, Rick. I'm no arborist, horticulturalist, or botanist, but I think it is hard to confuse a plum tree with a palm tree. I think most people could recognise a "palm tree" – there must be dozens (2600 according to Google) of different types, but they all have palm-like leaves (I suppose). Whereas I wouldn't know a plum tree if one got up and bit me! Nevertheless, I appreciate your thinking. And thanks for the link to my other question.

 

[KeyserSoza]

In the photo, it is fairly that it is a palm tree. Is it not an obvious mistranslation?

 

[Kathar1na]

I wonder what would be gained if someone would present a factual answer or a plausible answer to the question. What value could this bring?

We can all see what is on the photo: walls, grass, a tree, a well, straight paths dividing the grassy area in four. Grab a decent dictionary and you will find equivalent words in Spanish if you have a need for it. Unless you have a specialist interest in the Spanish language, what would you gain if you knew how the caption is worded in Spanish or was meant to be worded in Spanish?

This Claustro de los Caballeros in Najéra is a masterpiece of architecture and sculpture of the 16th century. The style is late Gothic (Gótico Florido) / Plateresque.

On the photo (below) you see three of the four walls that form the cloister - i.e. a covered passageway that lies behind the four walls. It forms a square. It served as a space for the monks for praying and reading, and it provided a connection between the various parts of the monastery complex. The four walls enclose an open-air patio; this patio is called quadrum but it is often just included in the word cloister.

You can see the same elements in the cloisters of many medieval monasteries: trees or just one tree and a source of water such as the well. Tree and water have symbolic meaning (paradise; Genesis).

Isn't all this more interesting than a caption that doesn't tell us anything more, even if it were comprehensible?

 

[Kathar1na]

The four walls enclose an open-air patio; this patio is called quadrum but it is often just included in the word cloister.

I've just learnt that there is word for it in English: garth.

From the web: A garth is an enclosed quadrangle or yard, especially one surrounded by a cloister. That's what you see on the photo from the Santa Maria la Real monastery in Najéra: cloister with garth. Not cloister with tree, and not cloister with well.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a nice website about the gardens of their famous Met Cloisters and about function and meaning:

In a monastery, a cloister is a square or rectangular open-air courtyard surrounded by covered passageways. The yard enclosed within these arcades is known as a garth. In a medieval monastic complex, the garth was often situated to the south side of the church, providing a sunny, sheltered place where the monks or nuns could enjoy nature without leaving the monastery.​

​

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the...l-art-and-the-cloisters/met-cloisters-gardens​

 

[Bert45]

In the photo, it is fairly that it is a palm tree. Is it not an obvious mistranslation?

A mistranslation of what, though? That is the question. It is not certain that the title is referring to the tree. It could be referring to the well, or to something else, completely. Kathar1na's comments seem to question whether my interest in the title is worth consideration. Probably not. But I was puzzled by the 'prune' and hoped that the forum could provide an answer.
Btw, 'garth', 'garden' and 'yard' share some etymology, apparently.

 

[Kathar1na]

The translator must have confused a palm tree with a plum tree; both words are four letters long, three of which are identical and in the same order. The English plum tree is ciruelo in Spanish. Ciruela is Spanish for the fruit, plum. The English prune is ciruela pasa in Spanish.

There is no human translator involved in all this who could have confused anything.

The photo and its caption belongs to a series of photographs by the same photographer und appears in identical form on a number of websites. These websites are huge collections of photographs that one can buy. They offer display in various languages. The translation is machine generated.

The English version of the caption for this photo of the Najera cloister is nonsense and the German version is particularly outstanding gibberish.

 

[Kathar1na]

A number of assumptions are wrong or at least unfounded, for example: that the caption has something to do with what the photo shows; that the English caption is a translation from Spanish and, if that were the case, that the unknown Spanish caption is error free or meaningful; that translations are not machine translations which miss context; that, as to global internet databases and websites, translations are one-way only and unique, and that there is no copy-pasting forwards and backwards between plurilingual websites, be it in the form of individual uploads or direct data transfers; etc. etc.

As mentioned, the photo of the Najéra cloister cum courtyard, palm tree, well, grass and paths is on numerous microstock websites. One of them is iStock by Getty Images where the four photos shown below have the same caption - all four of them:

In Spanish: Descripción Monasterio de Santa maría la Real, Najera, Navarre, España
In English: Description Cloister with prune in Santa Maria la Real monastery, Najera, La Rioja, Spain

​

 

[Bert45]

Thanks, Kathar1na. Your investigations are appreciated. I have a photo of the door in the second photo you have posted. I'd like to know the name of it, if anybody knows it. I've emailed the monastery, but not had a reply.

 

[Kathar1na]

I'd like to know the name of it, if anybody knows it. I've emailed the monastery, but not had a reply.

I just hope that they don't email back that this door is called "Puerta de Pasa" and that it is "Door of the Raisin" in English ...

 

[MinaKamina]

I just hope that they don't email back that this door is called "Puerto de Pasa" and that it is "Door of the Raisin" in English ...

No raisin hopes, Katharina!

 

[Kathar1na]

No raisin hopes, Katharina!

 

[Rick of Rick and Peg]

Thanks, Rick. I'm no arborist, horticulturalist, or botanist, but I think it is hard to confuse a plum tree with a palm tree.

It isn't a confusing of the type of tree but instead a mistaking of the word for it.

This morning before I had read @Kathar1na's posts submitted about the multiple machine translations I discovered the same thing. I decided to view the HTML source of the web page to see if I could find out the name of the caption writer. It wasn't there but I did see that the HTML had alternate URLs for English, German, Italian and French. I'm guessing that these were so if you visited the www.alamy.com version of the page but your browser was set for a different default language you would go to that page instead. Each of these versions had a different prune/plum translation of the caption. The German had Pflaume instead of Palme (Plum/Palm). So my guess is that someone with a less used first language (e.g., Finnish or Turkish) but had German as a second language wrote the caption and made the Plum for Palm error. The error then got propagated by machine translation to EN, IT and FR versions.

The quote below contains a snippet of the HTML code I found in www.alamy.com/cloister-with-prune-in-santa-maria-la-real-monastery-najera-la-rioja-spain-image425869403.html. I've added some bolding.

Maria la Real monastery, Najera, La Rioja, Spain - 2FMT0NF from Alamy&#x27;s library of millions of high resolution stock photos, illustrations and vectors."/><meta name="keywords" content="cave, church, cloister, facades, gothic, la rioja, late gothic, medieval, monastery, monument"/><link rel="canonical" href="https://www.alamy.com/cloister-with...ery-najera-la-rioja-spain-image425869403.html"/><link rel="alternate" hrefLang="en" href="https://www.alamy.com/cloister-with...ery-najera-la-rioja-spain-image425869403.html"/><link rel="alternate" hrefLang="de" href="https://www.alamy.de/kreuzgang-mit-...eal-najera-la-rja-spanien-image425869403.html"/><link rel="alternate" hrefLang="fr" href="https://www.alamyimages.fr/cloitre-...l-najera-la-rioja-espagne-image425869403.html"/><link rel="alternate" hrefLang="it" href="https://www.alamy.it/chiostro-con-p...al-najera-la-rioja-spagna-image425869403.html"/><meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large"/><script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","name":"Cloister with prune in Santa Maria la Real monastery, Najera, La Rioja, Spain","image":"https://

 

[Kathar1na]

We should just accept that the caption "cloister with prune" is nonsense in English and that we will never find out how it came to this and that it will not bring us much enlightenment if we did.

In the hope that this will be the end of it I'm sharing this: The photographer is from Barcelona, we don't know how and when he uploaded his 5000+ photos to several well-known microstock websites. Or what was entered - as caption and as tags -, mistyped, misunderstood, mistranslated, wrongly copied from where to where and when and in which sequence. On one of these microstack websites is a caption in Spanish for the photo. It says: Enclaustre con la pasa. On another microstack website with a Spanish version, the more common word claustro is used and there is no pasa.

Also note that Google does not capture everything that is on the worldwide web.

The caption in English is nonsense. It will remain nonsense, no matter how many answers we will still attempt in relation to the initial question.

 

[Pelegrin]

I just hope that they don't email back that this door is called "Puerta de Pasa" and that it is "Door of the Raisin" in English ...

Yes maybe because the correct "Puerta de Paso" has a feminine and a masculine together what must be a mess. "Pasa" is a dry raisin.

 

[Bert45]

It isn't a confusing of the type of tree but instead a mistaking of the word for it.

This morning before I had read @Kathar1na's posts submitted about the multiple machine translations I discovered the same thing. I decided to view the HTML source of the web page to see if I could find out the name of the caption writer. It wasn't there but I did see that the HTML had alternate URLs for English, German, Italian and French. I'm guessing that these were so if you visited the www.alamy.com version of the page but your browser was set for a different default language you would go to that page instead. Each of these versions had a different prune/plum translation of the caption. The German had Pflaume instead of Palme (Plum/Palm). So my guess is that someone with a less used first language (e.g., Finnish or Turkish) but had German as a second language wrote the caption and made the Plum for Palm error. The error then got propagated by machine translation to EN, IT and FR versions.

The quote below contains a snippet of the HTML code I found in www.alamy.com/cloister-with-prune-in-santa-maria-la-real-monastery-najera-la-rioja-spain-image425869403.html. I've added some bolding.

Thanks, Rick. I think that all makes some sort of sense. I am probably the least techy person on this forum – I don't have a smartphone – so what you have done is completely beyond me. Does your skill extend to correcting the caption? (Only joking!)

 

[Rick of Rick and Peg]

Does your skill extend to correcting the caption? (Only joking!)

It would be more fun to hack the images behind the paywall to have yellow arrows embedded in them. It'll cost you more though.