I'm trying to find the translation for a german sentence that I came across. I tried using freetranslation.com but it won't translate a couple of words. I'm hoping that someone on here speaks German and can hopefully help me out. Here's the sentence:

nicht den tod sollte man facrchten sondern dass man nic beginnen wird zu leben

I don't speak German, but "facrchten" looks like a typo; possibly "nic" isn't a word either.

Googling the first few words of the quote, you can find this - 'Nicht den Tod sollte man fürchten...'. It seems to be a quote from Marcus Aurelius.

"Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live." - Henry van Dyke (maybe)

NNN is right: there are a couple of typos in the German, which should read:

"Nicht den Tod sollte man fürchten, sondern dass man nie beginnen wird, zu leben."

Placing those commas is imoportant in German, which applies strict rules.

Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor a couple of millennia ago. The quote is from his work "Meditations", which it seems he wrote in Greek, and is usually rendered in English as:

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he
should fear never beginning to live."

Not a particularly pretty rendition, but it always seems to be quoted it like that.

http://www.bartleby.com/2/3/12.html

will take you to the Harvard Classics translation into English (see lines 11-12). Perhaps the quote is a shortened adaptation (?).

Thanks so much for the help! With the correct german spelling and grammar i was able to get the correct translation which is:

One should not fear death, but rather that one never will begin, to live

Yes; Kalena, I'll go along with your version. It reads better than the one I cited (which is the one usually quoted) and yours is a more accurate rendition of the German as well. I wonder what the original Greek says? I'll try and find out.

Odd how 'official' translations don't always reflect the idea exactly. "Tempus fugit" is always translated as 'time flies' but is better translated as 'time is fleeing' i.e. running away from us, with the idea that it's always just beyond us, ahead of us, and we must needs chase it. And "carpe diem" is not 'seize the moment' but is really 'pick the day' or 'pick the moment' in the sense of 'as you would pick a fresh flower from the plant, or gather fruit from the tree, when it is just perfect' ( a bit hard to put that pithily in English!)

Mmm, yes indeed. And building on your examples, let me quote one of the most famous of all, namely the Scott Moncrieff translation of Marcel Proust’s epic multi-tome work “A la recherche du temps perdu”.
It is generally recognised as a magnificent translation (he had begun translating the seventh and last volume when he died), and yet he actually got the title wrong, although it in its mis-translated form that the work is most commonly known in the English-speaking world today. He called it “Remembrance of Things Past”, unfortunately missing the thrust of Proust’s French, because the French title (à la recherché du) means that the writer is trying to recapture past times, not that he has succeeded, whereas the word “remembrance” does (think “Rembrance Sunday”). Additionally, “temps perdu” is ambiguous in the French language as it could just as equally refer to wasted time.
What Scott Moncrieff had done was to “borrow” his title from a Shakespeare sonnet, but it wasn’t an apt choice. So years afterwards when a new translation came out (Kilartin's), followed by another (the original French had been revised to eliminate certain errors) the new translator went for “In Search of Lost Time” as his title. Far more accurate, but rather more prosaic. There was endless debate in the press at the time. I was delighted that the great and mighty could make mistakes too!

Having been a professional translator for some years, I can speak to the difficulty of rendering the original text into another language. Much of it has to do with ambiguities of the original wording. "Recherche", for example, has several possibilities, those mentioned above, as well as 'investigation', 'study'. One has to read the novel to get an idea what the best rendering is. Johan Huizinga's magnificent study on the Middle Ages was originally translated as "The Waning of..." when the original title in Dutch was "The Autumn of..."
Things get really complicated when puns get involved. I have never seen a good translation, for example, of Richard III's opening lines in the Romance languages.

Translators do better with nonsense ! There are 'translations' of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky [" 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.."] in French and in German which convey the spirit of the piece. From memory, one of the French ones gives the meaning quite well too and the German one has pretty much the right kind of sound.

Perhaps Colin or JR can find one in French or German, or both .

Here we go then...

Il brilgue,
les tôves lubricilleux...
Se gyrent en vrillant
Dans le guave.
En mîmés sont
Les gouge bosqueux
Et le môme rade hors grave.

Source:
http://www.cswap.com/1977/Jabberwocky/cap/it