Hi there, I am VERY new at this so any help is GREATLY APPRECIATED!

I have a tattoo of the Celtic Tree of Life and Triquetra that I am wanting to get that is packed FULL of important meaning to me...right down to the color being used. My family is Scottish on my mother's side and I would like a small quote to go with it in Gaelic but I need help with the translation. I obviously want it to be correct and make sense. I am looking for something along the lines of:

"Find strength within for Life is a journey"

I think 'strength within' = neart laistigh .......and that 'life is a journey' = is turas é an saol

I'm just not sure how to combine them?? Also the correct pronuciation would help please!

Hi, Emily116, welcome to the forum.

There aren't a lot of Scottish speakers here so it may take a little while to get a reply.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

I saw after I posted that there is a seperate area for Scottish Gaelic that I posted my request there as well....not sure if it will make a difference where the request is?

Ah, right you are, I am half asleep and didn't see your thread was in a different section.

I've moved the original request to the Scottish section now as you can see.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

I'm not sure whether anyone has mentioned it, since your posts were moved, but the phrases you have already are in Irish (Irish Gaelic, or Gaeilge), and not in Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig). The two languages are closely related (both are descended from Old Irish), but a number of differences have grown up over the years.

One difference is that the expression laistigh does not have a Gaelic equivalent. I think this is because the Irish istigh is two words in Gaelic: a-staigh and it's hard to add prefixes to that (the la in laistigh is a prefix). The word neart is the same in Gaelic, so for "strength within" you could have either neart a-staigh or neart taobh a-staigh. Gaelic also has another colorful expression, am broinn, which literally means "in the belly", but is used to say "within" or "inside" in all sorts of situations. In the case of your expression, am broinn would actually have a nice double meaning, so I suggest using neart am broinn. Your second expression works fine in Gaelic, with some spelling changes: Is turas e an saoghal [note that, in modern Gaelic, there is normally no accent on the word e].

Putting it all together for your target phrase:

Faigh neart am broinn, oir is turas e an saoghal
Find strength within, for life is a journey

Some people consider the word oir ("for") used that way to be a bit formal in modern Gaelic (there are a lot of things like that which people understand, but would not use themselves for the most part). To avoid that you could switch to "because":

Faigh neart am broinn, a chionn is gur turas e an saoghal
Find strength within, because life is a journey

I'm not terribly good at indicating Gaelic pronunciation, because it has a lot of sounds which are hard for English speakers (more so than Irish). I can try, but first let's see what other comments there are, because there is at least one other regular on this forum whose Gaelic is very good, and he may have better ideas.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Thanks! I knew that there had to be some differences between the Irish and the Scottish but I wasnt sure how broad they were. I had a hard time finding ANYTHING in Scottish...it always re-routed me back to Irish

I think I like the "oir" version better because its shorter...as long as it's correct. I have limited space so to speak so the shorter the better....again as long as it is correct and makes sense!

OH! Also, you said that in modern Gaelic there is no accent on the 'e'.....not sure it it would be different really or not but I think I would prefer the "old" versions so to speak because I am using the traditional symbol so keeping with "old" or "tradtional" language will fit

Well, the problem is that the use of accents has been in flux in Gaelic for a few centuries, and is only just recently starting to settle down into a standard. Avoiding the technical terms for them, Gaelic speakers used to use accents slanted in both directions (both á and à), but for different phonetic purposes. Modern Gaelic uses only the one direction now (as in à), the opposite of Irish usage (which is á), and has also dropped the accents from many words where they still remain in Irish (you will still see the old system in some dictionaries, but not in the newer ones).

When it had an accent, the word "he/it", which is now e in Gaelic, would have been written in the "Irish" style, as é, but if you were to write it that way now people would probably assume you just made a mistake and wrote the Irish word, although they would certainly understand the meaning [actually, in Irish "he/it" is sé in some cases and é in others, for grammatical reasons, but it is always just e in Gaelic now].

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

So it's just become simplified over time then basically? Just to be sure I followed that:

Irish would be: é

Gaelic now would be: e

But it used to be with the accent slanted opposite the Irish? And still means the same thing?

I think I'm gonna need to take a class lol....

Scottish Gaelic used acute accents and the Gaelic script until some time in the 19th century, I think. After that they used the Roman script (ie. the same we use now) with both acute and grave accents (àéèìóòù): é was a closed long e, è an open long e, ó was a closed long o, ò an open long o (à, ì and ù have only the grave-accented version since they only have one pronunciation).
A couple of years ago they decided to only use the grave accents (ie. to abandon ó and é), but not everybody follows this rule, there are people who still use the "old" way.

Concerning the pronoun é/e, here's an example:

Scottish: Chunnaic mi e (=I saw him)
Irish: Chonaic mé é (=I saw him).

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne