# Something weird has happened.



## eduard85

Hi,


I'm trying to translate the phrase 'Something weird has happened.' into Czech for a generic error webpage.

Could you please tell me if one the following sentences is better than the other or if both are okay?

*Něco divného se stalo.*
*Něco divného došlo.*



Many thanks!


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## namenlos12300

Hi,

the phrase 'Something weird has happened.' you can translate as:

*Něco divného se stalo.* < less used
*Stalo se něco divného.*
*K něčemu divnému došlo.* < less used
*Došlo k něčemu divnému
*


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## Enquiring Mind

Those are, of course, correct translations of "something weird has happened", but I wonder if you would expect to see that phrase in the context of a webpage error. What I usually see in this kind of context is "nastala chyba" as here (source: bdleckova.cz) or "došlo k chybě" as here (source: job-tip.cz). They mean the same: an error has occurred, there's been an error.


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## hypoch

I agree with both namenlos and Enquiring mind. 

The word order does matter - the two "less used" examples have a non-standard word order. This means they are perfectly correct but they somehow catch your eye and give the sentence some undertones. For example, *K něčemu divnému došlo.* could be interpreted as putting stress on *došlo*, i.e. *Something weird HAS happened**.* Or it could mean the speaker chooses a slightly literary / fairy-tale-like style of introducing a story. These would be my interpretations and others could probably come up with others, a lot also depends on the tone of the voice when the sentence is spoken aloud etc.

It also struck me as an odd way of announcing a webpage error on the screen. However, the English original is a bit odd to have as a screen message, isn't it? It may be intentionally slightly non-technical for a screen message, so maybe namenlos's suggestions aren't quite out of place, even though you would normally go for something like *an error has occurred* / *došlo k chybě* in a screen message. On the other hand, my feeling is (I might be wrong) that the English original feels less spoken-style than namenlos's Czech translations - English sometimes tends to use a more informal way of expressing things compared to Czech. So another option could be to use something rather neutral, which could be *Stala se chyba.*


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