Activada or activado?

[AleXD]

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-spanish/search?source=auto&query=Emergency+Stop+Activated

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

I assume, only one form is correct.

Thanks a lot for any help and kind regards
Alex

[poli]

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.

[wrholt]

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.

[AleXD]

Thanks guys!

Looking forward to start learning some Spanish soon :)

[Dannylearns]

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