Et Iris

Pseudonym99

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I am puzzled that Google Translates Rainbow as Et Iris, whereas most of the references to translations of the word Rainbow as Arcus, and others. This is not my concern, knowing Iris is originally a Greek loan word, used for Rainbow in Latin.

My question is, why would Iris for Rainbow, be Et Iris, what connotations would this imply? Specifically as a noun Rainbow. Also, when was this first used? Was Et Iris regularly used? Is this an authentic Latin usage to say Rainbow, even though Iris is of Greek origin? Especially concerned about Et Iris meaning Rainbow.
 

Pacifica

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Never trust Google Translate, it's hopeless at Latin.

Here, for example, it added a random word, et, which means "and", "also", or "even".

Iris, however, on its own, is a valid translation for "rainbow".
 

Pseudonym99

New Member

Any meanings of "et" making it have a more official resonance on Rainbow? I've seen it have a translation of "Chief" elsewhere. Could it imply a sublime official Rainbow, in a sense? Not in a literal translation, but in a Poetic fashion.
 

Pacifica

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No, absolutely not.

Et cannot, in any situation whatsoever, mean "chief".
 

lepus

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Any meanings of "et" making it have a more official resonance on Rainbow? I've seen it have a translation of "Chief" elsewhere. Could it imply a sublime official Rainbow, in a sense? Not in a literal translation, but in a Poetic fashion.
It is due to the very nature of Google Translate: an incredibly large translation memory with fuzzy search capability and some ingenious mechanism to combine found words and phrases into new sentences. The TM consists of many bilingual texts corpora, built up from chunks of texts extracted from what Google identified as translations - ideally, human-made or human-proved. Therefore its accuracy depends on the availability of material, and gets higher when both languages in a given pair are fairly popular.

Latin is not so, I'm afraid, but there exists one vast and widely translated text, that contributed to Google's Latin-English TM. One of the most popular English versions, King James Bible, contains the word "rainbow" twice, both times in the Book of Apocalypse (in Genesis, "the bow" was used). How it translates into Latin?

Et qui sedebat similis erat aspectui lapidis jaspidis, et sardinis : et iris erat in circuitu sedis similis visioni smaragdinæ. Ap 4:3

Et vidi alium angelum fortem descendentem de cælo amictum nube, et iris in capite ejus, et facies ejus erat ut sol, et pedes ejus tamquam columnæ ignis. Apc 10:1

Google Translate does not know grammar or vocabulary (in the ordinary sense of the word) of any language, and is not concerned with them at all. It just finds out that wherever you encounter "rainbow" in English, it corresponds to "et iris" in Latin. To be precise, "et" and "eris" always come together in any given context (it's not Google's fault that it knows only two), and there is no way to assign the meaning "rainbow" to one of them. Apart from that, they might represent a phraseme in Latin, so it is safer to not split them in translation.
 

Pseudonym99

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I'm French, I know "et" means the same thing in Latin, was wondering if there were any other connotations, I guess it simply means "et" in French. Thank you very much for the Vulgate quotes, that one from Rev. is my favorite line in the entire Bible. I have an old King James Version printed in the early 1800's with a red page outline, it's still remarkably in one piece, the most treasured Book in my collection, using words such as "Thy", "thou", etc. The thing that strikes me the most about this passage, in my KJV, is that "a rainbow was over his head", was Italicized, emphasizing on the reality that it truly was there, or prophetically is to be. I was looking for Authenticity, these Vulgate quotes made it for me, thanks again.
 

Callaina

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It is due to the very nature of Google Translate: an incredibly large translation memory with fuzzy search capability and some ingenious mechanism to combine found words and phrases into new sentences. The TM consists of many bilingual texts corpora, built up from chunks of texts extracted from what Google identified as translations - ideally, human-made or human-proved. Therefore its accuracy depends on the availability of material, and gets higher when both languages in a given pair are fairly popular.

Latin is not so, I'm afraid, but there exists one vast and widely translated text, that contributed to Google's Latin-English TM. One of the most popular English versions, King James Bible, contains the word "rainbow" twice, both times in the Book of Apocalypse (in Genesis, "the bow" was used). How it translates into Latin?

Et qui sedebat similis erat aspectui lapidis jaspidis, et sardinis : et iris erat in circuitu sedis similis visioni smaragdinæ. Ap 4:3

Et vidi alium angelum fortem descendentem de cælo amictum nube, et iris in capite ejus, et facies ejus erat ut sol, et pedes ejus tamquam columnæ ignis. Apc 10:1

Google Translate does not know grammar or vocabulary (in the ordinary sense of the word) of any language, and is not concerned with them at all. It just finds out that wherever you encounter "rainbow" in English, it corresponds to "et iris" in Latin. To be precise, "et" and "eris" always come together in any given context (it's not Google's fault that it knows only two), and there is no way to assign the meaning "rainbow" to one of them. Apart from that, they might represent a phraseme in Latin, so it is safer to not split them in translation.
This is fascinating, actually. I knew the general way in which Google Translate and similar search-based translation programs worked, but it's quite interesting to see how something weird like "et iris" can be traced back to a particular source, and what the computer (using, admittedly, some sort of logic even if it's not the best thing under these particular circumstances) decided to do about it here. Thanks for the commentary! :D
 

Pacifica

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The thing that strikes me the most about this passage, in my KJV, is that "a rainbow was over his head", was Italicized, emphasizing on the reality that it truly was there, or prophetically is to be.
Actually, I think that when a word is italicized in the KJV, it means that the word isn't literally present in the original, but is added to make the translation normal English. The original Greek of this verse confirms it: καὶ ἡ ἶρις ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ, word for word, "and the rainbow over the head of him"—no "was".
 

Iohannes Aurum

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If Google Translate were a student, he/she would fail very badly, since he/she doesn't understand context 99% of the time.
 

Callaina

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The word "understand" really isn't applicable to computers and the processes by which they compute, IMHO.
 

Pacifica

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I guess that was Aurifex's reasoning, too.

Also, it's kind of funny to call GT "he/she", lol.
 

Iohannes Aurum

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I guess that was Aurifex's reasoning, too.

Also, it's kind of funny to call GT "he/she", lol.
That's why I said, "If Google Translate were a student."
 

Pacifica

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Yes, I know, the gender got attracted into that of a student. It still looked kind of funny to me, though, especially in the part "since he/she doesn't understand context 99% of the time", because this is stating what is the case now (when GT is a machine, not a student) rather than what would be the case if it were a student.
 
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