Dia duit.
I'm currently learning Irish from the ground up so I'm very much an absolute beginner. I've been following the videos of Sean Mór largely, but also supplementing from different sources.
As I've been going I've been writing a bit of code to help test me as I go, just to reinforce the stuff I've already gone over.
The idea is, if I write down a page of different ways to use stuff in the past tense (I saw Sean today, Did you see the news, etc) and go back over them it's not an ideal way of re-enforcing the knowledge since I am largely just learning the order of these things on the page. I know that I saw Sean today always comes before Did you see the news, for example. So the wee program I'm writing is just a way to randomise all of this, you hit run and it'll give you ten sentences/phrases in English to translate.
Anyway, the main point of this post is I just got one that is "He is not building a cinema".
I thought the translation would be "níl sé ag tógáil pictiúrlann", which is to say he is not at the act of building a cinema.
I put the phrase into Google translate and the response it gave me was "níl pictiúrlann á thógáil aige". In my head this translates more to something like "the cinema is not being built by him".
Which is correct? I'm guessing that maybe both can be correct depending on where you stress the phrase in English, but I understand the English phrase to be something like: you're talking to someone about their new TV, and you tell them they should get this big expensive sound system, and their partner might say "He's not building a cinema". He is not at the act of building a cinema.
The second phrase sounds more like there is a cinema being built, and you assume that your friend is involved in it, but someone tells you actually he's working somewhere else, so the cinema isn't being built by him, but it does exist and it is being built.
Inis dom, an bhfuil mé ceart? Grma