Activada or activado?
 

Hi,

I need a translation for the term "Emergency Stop Activated".
In my opinion, it would be "Parada de emergencia activada"

But unfortunately, I can also find a lot of examples where 'activado' was used:
http://www.linguee.com/english-spani...Stop+Activated

However, there are also examples for 'activada':
http://www.linguee.es/espanol-ingles...+activada.html

I assume, only one form is correct.

Thanks a lot for any help and kind regards
Alex

Both are correct depending on context. In Spanish nouns have gender and the adjective which describes the noun must have the same gender. Activado/o is the adjective in this case. When the noun it describes is feminine, then the adjective is activada. When masculine, it's activado.

The first example in the first link is the sentence pair:

English: The lift cannot be charged with the emergency stop button activated.
Spanish: Esta grúa no se puede cargar con el botón de parada de emergencia activado.

The noun phrase that "activado" modifies is "el botón de parada de emergencia" = "the emergency stop button". The object that is activated is "the button" = "el botón", which is a masculine noun.

In the third example at that link, the sentence pair is:

English: Check that the emergency stop has not been activated.
Spanish: Compruebe que la parada de emergencia no está activada.

In this case the phrase "la parada de emergencia" doesn't modify another noun; rather, it is the feminine singular noun that is the subject of the verb "estar", and the adjective "activada" agrees with it.

Thanks guys!

Looking forward to start learning some Spanish soon :)

yes the context is key with spanish! a veces pienso que hay idiomas mas faciles que no tienen feminina y masculino