Does anyone know of a reliable English to Latin translator

msd · Jan 5, 2013

Does anyone know of a reliable English to Latin translator on the web?

I have tried two of them and they gave me different results for the same word. I don’t speak Latin, hell I don’t even speak well in English so I can’t get my Latin translating wrong.

patskywriter · Jan 5, 2013

Have you tried Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/)? I use it when checking song lyrics (I'm a DJ).

Deleted member 42 · Jan 5, 2013

Were I you, I'd ask in the International forum; lots of people who are very knowledgeable about Latin, and can help.

Software/machine based translation has very limited usability at present.

Torgo · Jan 5, 2013

Medievalist said:
Were I you, I'd ask in the International forum; lots of people who are very knowledgeable about Latin, and can help.

Software/machine based translation has very limited usability at present.

Which is odd, because it seems like Latin would be a great candidate for it, with everything so inflected. Although having said that I can't decide whether that and the word order thing are pros or cons w/r/t that.

evilrooster · Jan 5, 2013

As far as I know, there isn't any. And I have a BA in Latin, and still do a bit of poking around the language, so I try to keep up with what the web is doing with it these days.

(Google translate, by the way, is of patchy quality even between closely related languages. It's useful for getting the sense of the passage, or for very simple communications where you don't have a common language, but I wouldn't rely on its correctness in any formal or legal context.)

If you're looking for translations of individual Latin words, I'd suggest the Perseus Project's tool for searching the definitions of their Latin dictionary for English words, available here. You have to do some digging, but you're more likely to get a reasonable translation out of it at the end.

Alternatively, if it's only a few words or a short sentence or two, just ask here on the thread and I'll give it a whirl. I know we have at least one other Classicist (a better one than I am) who posts in this room, so we can cross-check each other.

fadeaccompli · Jan 5, 2013

I'm just going to second everything that evilrooster said. Translating from a foreign language via machine can be useful for getting the gist of a bit of text, but I would never recommend translating to a language you don't know via machine, if you plan on showing it to anyone else.

I'm in my fourth year of Latin study at the university level--fifth, if you count taking introductory Latin twice ten years apart--and I still have to wrangle with translating things into Latin accurately and elegantly, even given plenty of time to fiddle with stuff. And that's after taking a whole course just on translating from English to Latin. There's a lot of potential ambiguity in English that a machine just isn't going to be able to parse accurately, much less render into good (as opposed to merely technically accurate) Latin.

patskywriter · Jan 5, 2013

I didn't take the time to ask what it is you're translating. I was assuming, since no one speaks Latin any more, that you were only looking to translate a few words and phrases. So … what is it you're translating?

msd · Jan 5, 2013

evilrooster said:
As far as I know, there isn't any. And I have a BA in Latin, and still do a bit of poking around the language, so I try to keep up with what the web is doing with it these days.

(Google translate, by the way, is of patchy quality even between closely related languages. It's useful for getting the sense of the passage, or for very simple communications where you don't have a common language, but I wouldn't rely on its correctness in any formal or legal context.)

If you're looking for translations of individual Latin words, I'd suggest the Perseus Project's tool for searching the definitions of their Latin dictionary for English words, available here. You have to do some digging, but you're more likely to get a reasonable translation out of it at the end.

Alternatively, if it's only a few words or a short sentence or two, just ask here on the thread and I'll give it a whirl. I know we have at least one other Classicist (a better one than I am) who posts in this room, so we can cross-check each other.

You are all correct; I only have a few words to translate. I did not want to burden anyone with what should be my research, but since you kindly offered, this is what I am trying to translate into Latin.

Truth seekers
Seekers of truth
Seekers of accurate knowledge

Anything using these words that would sound good for a secrete religious organization.

evilrooster · Jan 6, 2013

I see that the better Classicist I referred to above has appeared (ohai, fadeaccompli!)

The basic bog-standard translation of "seekers after truth" is veritatem quaerentes, but that doesn't sound quite organizational enough.

Jamesaritchie · Jan 6, 2013

The only truly reliable translator I've found for any language is a person who speaks that language well. They aren't difficult to find, even for Latin.

Deleted member 42 · Jan 6, 2013

patskywriter said:
I didn't take the time to ask what it is you're translating. I was assuming, since no one speaks Latin any more, that you were only looking to translate a few words and phrases. So … what is it you're translating?

Actually, lots of people still live and speak in Latin; in the Vatican and in a few monastic establishments. It's Church Latin, but in many ways, Latin is but a dying and not quite dead language.

Deleted member 42 · Jan 6, 2013

Torgo said:
Which is odd, because it seems like Latin would be a great candidate for it, with everything so inflected. Although having said that I can't decide whether that and the word order thing are pros or cons w/r/t that.

The problem with machine translation in general (and we use machine translation a lot in the software industry) is that at least right now, it's basically a really big and really fast lookup on a giant word list with lots of parsing.

Machine translation works best when you can very narrowly restrict vocabulary and when you can restrict connotation.

So for instance, writing Help or technical documents in English that you know will be machine translated to 27 languages mean you use a very restricted vocabulary, syntax and range of meaning.

The stuff is run through a parser, and then machine translated, and then one or two humans who are native speakers go over it and correct it—using the same very restricted ranges of meaning, syntax and vocabulary.

patskywriter · Jan 6, 2013

Medievalist said:
Actually, lots of people still live and speak in Latin; in the Vatican and in a few monastic establishments. It's Church Latin, but in many ways, Latin is but a dying and not quite dead language.

Interesting! I was thinking that it had died out. I do remember going to my grandmother's church every now and then when I was a little kid (she was a converted Catholic). The service was conducted in Latin and I sat there baffled wondering what the heck was going on.

fadeaccompli · Jan 6, 2013

evilrooster said:
I see that the better Classicist I referred to above has appeared (ohai, fadeaccompli!)

The basic bog-standard translation of "seekers after truth" is veritatem quaerentes, but that doesn't sound quite organizational enough.

*blushes*

And to be honest, I'm much happier translating sentences than phrases, at that. So much of my choice of words depends on the intended meaning of what's being said, and I get flustered when trying to translate what are essentially organization names, as keeps coming up. That seems much more a medieval thing than a classical Latin thing--and I haven't studied any medieval Latin at all!

Deleted member 42 · Jan 6, 2013

fadeaccompli said:
That seems much more a medieval thing than a classical Latin thing--and I haven't studied any medieval Latin at all!

You will notice I'm not offering. The changes in geography and era wrt medieval Latin are

making.

fadeaccompli · Jan 6, 2013

Medievalist said:
You will notice I'm not offering. The changes in geography and era wrt medieval Latin are making.

I desperately want to study some medieval Latin, just to get an introduction to what sorts of changes went on, and so forth. But I don't think my classics department--which is large and vigorous, as these things go--has offered one yet that I've seen. Maybe that's just for graduate students? Or more specialized departments/universities.

brianjanuary · Jan 6, 2013

Yes, people today still speak Latin (scholars, church). The Catholic church, unfortunately, pronounces the language incorrectly with an Italian accent (if you want to hear it pronounced correctly, try to find a copy of Norman's Awesome Experience, a 1988 movie in which people go back in time to the first century CE--as soon as they get there, most of the dialogue is in Latin).

As for your translation, veritatem quaerentes seems right, but it's not a very cool name for a secret group. Perhaps you might want to rethink the name?

Deleted member 42 · Jan 6, 2013

fadeaccompli said:
Maybe that's just for graduate students? Or more specialized departments/universities.

It's not offered much at all anymore. If a school has a graduate medieval studies program, you can usually find a medieval Latinist.

The best way I know of right now is to go to the University of Toronto's medieval Latin summer school:

http://medieval.utoronto.ca/latin/summer/

It's fabulous.

UCLA used to have Bengt Lofstedt. He ran an informal Medieval latin study group once a week for years and years. It was obscenely fun, and very hard.

fadeaccompli · Jan 7, 2013

Medievalist said:
It's not offered much at all anymore. If a school has a graduate medieval studies program, you can usually find a medieval Latinist.

The best way I know of right now is to go to the University of Toronto's medieval Latin summer school:

http://medieval.utoronto.ca/latin/summer/

It's fabulous.

UCLA used to have Bengt Lofstedt. He ran an informal Medieval latin study group once a week for years and years. It was obscenely fun, and very hard.

Oh, lovely! I should put that on the list of summer programs I'd really like to try some day. (Along with Clarion, and Taos Toolbox, and that two-week Latin speaking program in Los Angeles... Sigh.)

evilrooster · Jan 7, 2013

brianjanuary said:
The Catholic church, unfortunately, pronounces the language incorrectly with an Italian accent

The Catholic church pronounces it with the ecclesiastical accent, which is different than the Classical accent. Neither is more or less correct than the other, in the same way that Shakespearean English pronunciation is neither more or less correct than a modern Australian accent.

As for your translation, veritatem quaerentes seems right, but it's not a very cool name for a secret group. Perhaps you might want to rethink the name?

I was short of time and wanted to offer a starting point for other Latinists to correct, change, or suggest alternatives to. I'm not a medievalist, but since we're trying to generate a plausible name rather than rediscover a real, true one, I was hoping that someone else would take a stab at it.

Please do feel free to offer some suggestions yourself.

brianjanuary · Jan 10, 2013

Actually, the church pronounces Latin with more or less a modern Italian accent, very different from the pronunciation of classical Latin. For example, in classical Latin the letters "c" and "g" are always hard (as in "cat" or "get"), but the church pronounces them as "ch" or "j" sounds when they occur before the vowels "e" and "i" (as in modern Italian). In classical Latin, the letter "v" was pronounced as "w", whereas ecclesiastical Latin pronounces it as "v", etc.

evilrooster · Jan 11, 2013

brianjanuary said:
Actually, the church pronounces Latin with more or less a modern Italian accent, very different from the pronunciation of classical Latin. For example, in classical Latin the letters "c" and "g" are always hard (as in "cat" or "get"), but the church pronounces them as "ch" or "j" sounds when they occur before the vowels "e" and "i" (as in modern Italian). In classical Latin, the letter "v" was pronounced as "w", whereas ecclesiastical Latin pronounces it as "v", etc.

Yes. That's the major difference between the ecclesiastical accent and the classical accent.

Neither of them is "incorrect"; they're two different accents from two different times and contexts. Ecclesiastical pronunciation is perfectly legitimate in its context; if you use the Classical accent in Gregorian chant, you're going to sound pretty odd.

Incorrect would be (to pick an example not at random, sigh) the tendency of Dutch native speakers to lengthen short vowels when they occur in open syllables. Though I suspect that that's cosmic revenge for what I do to Dutch.

John Chapman · Jan 11, 2013

evilrooster said:
I have a BA in Latin, and still do a bit of poking around the language...

Alternatively, if it's only a few words or a short sentence or two, just ask here on the thread and I'll give it a whirl.

The problem with machine translation is that it has no idea of idiom and meanings can be totally lost.

Example. If you try to translate the word 'rainbow' you'll get 'arcus pluvius' which would be the literal translation of 'bow' and 'rain'. I have a sneaking suspicion that, before the Romans became Christian, they would have referred to 'Isis' bow' Arcus Isis instead however. Isis was the goddess of the rainbow. It needs a greater expert than I for the correct translation. Any ideas EvilRooster?

Rufus Coppertop · Jan 11, 2013

evilrooster said:
veritatem quaerentes,

Quaerentes isthe nominative and accusative plural form of the present participle. It means seeking.

For practitioners of a verb,we can add tor (M) or trix (F) to the supine stem.

Quaesitores = seekers.

Veritatem Quaesitores = truth seekers

brianjanuary · Jan 11, 2013

The point I was trying to make is that many people think that classical Latin was pronounced in the same way that ecclesiastical Latin currently pronounced. This is what is incorrect.

Rufus Coppertop--

Latin grammar often uses an implied subject, hence quarentes veritatem is the correct form (literally it means "those seeking the truth").

Does anyone know of a reliable English to Latin translator

msd

patskywriter

Deleted member 42

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.

evilrooster

Wicked chicken

fadeaccompli

here and there again

patskywriter

msd

evilrooster

Wicked chicken

Jamesaritchie

Deleted member 42

Deleted member 42

patskywriter

fadeaccompli

here and there again

Deleted member 42

fadeaccompli

here and there again

brianjanuary

Deleted member 42

fadeaccompli

here and there again

evilrooster

Wicked chicken

brianjanuary

evilrooster

Wicked chicken

John Chapman

Rufus Coppertop

brianjanuary