[lonesword]

Oh I'd definitely love to see this completed. I don't speak Spanish, so I'm not sure if this would be a problem here - are all sentences in Spanish guaranteed to have an almost one-one translation to English? In other words, what happens when the word order changes? This would be a huge deal in German.

[Phillip98798]

Thanks, no the order differs in Spanish as well. That’s why it’s going to take me a while as I’m going over the Spanish and English translations and trying to make it work. I will try to honor the Spanish order more than the English, even if that makes the English sound weird. The idea is you know English, so it doesn’t have to be very understandable on the English side. Just enough to give you the context.

[livre]

My native language is Spanish. An interesting thing about it is that changing the word order generally does not change the meaning but it changes how it sounds (more prosaic or more poetic). That's not a hard rule, I'm sure you can also find examples where changing the word order changes the meaning.

I also agree with the rest of the comments here, the original Don Quixote is not a good book for learning Spanish, see here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#Style

A modern children's adaptation of the story may be a good choice for learning if OP wants to use the same story.

[vinay427]

German would definitely be problematic but it's still likely to be one of the least affected, especially in the English -> German direction, and nearly every word would at least has a clear translation. Virtually any sentence in an SOV (or less common, OSV) language would be essentially unworkable while maintaining word order.

[bobthepanda]

German SV2O is still very jarring to me as a language learner; I just can‘t get used to looking forward in the sentence to decipher the verb, as compared to English.

[vinay427]

Definitely, as a fellow German learner. The "flexibility" or unpredictability of word order, largely due to the greater inflection based on grammatical case, makes it much more challenging unless one is a native speaker who can probably more intuitively decipher the roles of each word.

[herbst]

Also one sentence order might sound right in the one region and totally awkward in another. As a native speaker its mainly intuitive