Hi,I am Learning Donegal Irish but am interested in All translations .Last night I saw the northern lights and wondered about the Irish Wors for it;I Looked it up and got na gealáin thuaidh which seems straight from English,and na saighdeáin I’m curious what words do you all know for the northern lights? What does the Gaeltacht say?

Na gealáin thuaidh is fine, and is probably the more common way of translating "the northern lights". It isn't a direct translation from English either, as you seem to be suggesting. It actually translates something closer to "the northern gleamings/shinings".

If you particularly want to avoid it, you have two options I can think of. Firstly, even in English people employ the Latin term, Aurora Borealis. You can use this in just the same way in an otherwise Irish sentence as you would use it in English. Aside from that, another option is an fáinne ó thuaidh, "the halo/ring from the north", which is nice but I don't hear it being used very often.

You have to ask a Gaeltacht native what, if anything, they say for the Northern Lights. Looking in dictionaries of Standardised Irish won't tell you anything - they are dictionaries compiled by L2 speakers in Dublin.

No, these are pretty well accepted.

Here's a gallery of pictures taken in Ros an Mhíl and published by tuairisc.ie:

GAILEARAÍ: Na Gealáin Thuaidh le feiceáil sa spéir os cionn Ghaeltacht Chonamara

And here's another article from the same site from six years earlier:

An Aurora Borealis ‘is fearr’ le 10 mbliana le feiceáil i nGaeltacht Thír Chonaill anocht

I didn't say the term would not be found - that obviously escaped you - but that you would have to ask a Gaeltacht person what they called it, and not consult a dictionary. Of course, it would be interesting to know if the writers of those articles on Tuairisc used the term taken from colloquial Conamara Irish that all natives are familiar with, or whether those writers are educated in the Caighdeán Oifigiúil and found the term in a dictionary.... You fail to realise that people working in the Irish language industry are all working in the CO - and that includes people in the Gaeltacht, eg. in Údarás na Gaeltachta, the bunscoileanna and meánscoileanna etc - and if the writers of those articles are Gaeltacht natives (which I don't know), it would also include them. The question still remains: is there a term in colloquial Conamara Irish for the Northern Lights? It **might** be that the colloquial term is na Gealáin Thuaidh, but you haven't shown that at all.