Robert Carter Feb 8, 2018:

I agree, it has to be a tautology, just look at the opposite: "unintentional attempt". If an attempt is unintentional, then it's not an attempt.
For example, the phrase "a deliberate attempt to mislead someone", even if it sounds right, would be invalid because it is a simple case of word-order confusion. For "deliberate" not to be redundant, the sentence would have to be "an attempt to deliberately mislead someone", with "deliberately" modifying "mislead", not "attempt".
After a brief Google search, I didn't find any examples of "intento intencional" that weren't tautologies.

Charles Davis Feb 7, 2018:

@Neil The combination "intento intencional" does occur, I admit, though I think it's clumsy at best. But strictly speaking I'm not sure you can have an unintentional attempt; attempt seems to me to imply intention, which is why I say it's a tautology. In any case it doesn't make sense unless you go on to say "un intento intencional de..."; in other words, unless you say "a deliberate attempt to...". So a sentence that says "la mercancía se muestra como un intento intencional y teleológico", without saying what it is an attempt to do, is unconvincing to me, in a text of this kind.

neilmac Feb 7, 2018:

@Charles So "deliberate attempt" (intento intencional) isn't valid? I beg to differ. Another option could be "deliberate subterfuge" i.e. an attempt to mislead the potential customer. However, if Robert claims to have found the original text, who am I to argue?

Charles Davis Feb 7, 2018:

method Robert's answer demonstrates a method that is always worth trying in this sort of case: do a Google search for a short string from the rest of the sentence that is distinctive enough not to produce too many results (e.g. intencional y teleológico cargado de promesas"). Just copy it and paste it in the search box, and put quotation marks round it. You have the answer in seconds. It often works with published texts, so many of which are online nowadays.

Charles Davis Feb 7, 2018:

intento I'm surprised to see colleagues saying that "intento" makes sense here. To me it doesn't make any sense to describe goods or merchandise as an "intento", quite apart from the fact that "intento intencional" is a clumsy tautology and it is unlikely anyone would have written it.