Could someone help me with this one line translation?

[Josh1989]

Hi, I'm a first years classical history student and I thought it would be fun to take a Latin module. None of us have studied it before but we get into nerdy arguments after class and this is the most recent; I was hoping someone could help with it:

What is the correct translation of "The world is better than it isn't."? Our attempts are a grammatical mess but I'd be quite interested to know if only to disprove my classmates theories. Thanks.

Josh

[thesaurus]

I don't really understand the sentence in English, so I'm not sure I can provide a useful translation. Could you elucidate it a little?

Nonetheless, here is a literal attempt:

Orbis terrarum melior est quam non est.

However, I'm not sure it's possible to compare a noun "Orbis terrarum" with a finite verb "non est". Again, I'd like to know what this phrase is supposed to convey.

[Josh1989]

I don't really understand the sentence in English, so I'm not sure I can provide a useful translation. Could you elucidate it a little?

Nonetheless, here is a literal attempt:

Orbis terrarum melior est quam non est.

However, I'm not sure it's possible to compare a noun "Orbis terrarum" with a finite verb "non est". Again, I'd like to know what this phrase is supposed to convey.

Well we were reading epigrams, by Marshal I think, and the gist of a few seemed to be that everything was alright. The state of the world was better than it could be: better than it wasn't good. Sorry, its quite hard to explain in writing. In grammatically wrong English: "the world is gooder than it is bad" is the message we were trying to convey.

I hope that clarifies a bit but either way thank you for the translation above.