Any actually good online translators?

[Caleb Lewis]

All,

This may or may not be common knowledge in the Latin internet-verse, but are there any actually good, accurate onine Latin translators? Preferably for translating single sentences or perhaps short phrases? I'm in the process of teaching myself Latin and need to be able to quickly check if I'm doing some translations accurately without spamming the Latin-English or English-Latin translation forums here with frequent requests. Anyways, thanks!

 

[Dantius]

No.

 

[AoM]

If you're worried about flooding the forums here, maybe look into some Latin chatrooms.

 

[Iáson]

If you're using (as you mentioned) Wheelock, there is probably an answer book somewhere.

 

[Caleb Lewis]

If you're worried about flooding the forums here, maybe look into some Latin chatrooms.

I didn't know there were Latin chat room! Lol. Do you recommend any?

If you're using (as you mentioned) Wheelock, there is probably an answer book somewhere.

There is, and I have that, but I'm looking for a resource to check my translations of non-textbook phrases as well.

 

[Callaina]

Current automatic translators cannot deal with Latin in anything approaching a reliable manner.

As far as I can tell, there are two main reasons for this:

1. Latin, grammatically and syntactically speaking, is set up very differently from English (and from most widely-used modern languages).

2a. Most automatic translators work by data-mining -- i.e. drawing statistical conclusions from a vast corpus of texts translated by humans (or at least checked by them) between the two languages in question.

2b. There is no sufficiently large corpus of texts translated from Latin into English and vice versa available for an automatic translator to draw upon (as there is for, say, millions of modern documents, web pages, etc. translated from English into French and French into English).

The consequences are that:

1. most translation bots simply don't "understand" how to handle Latin; it conveys and organizes information using structures and categories that just don't exist in other languages.

2. even if the bot in question had some "idea" about how to handle Latin grammar and syntax, there is no sufficiently large corpus which it could draw upon to understand the meaning and usage of individual words and expressions.

(That's my two cents, but Godmy, I suspect, will have more to add to this .)

 

[Pacifica]

it conveys and organizes information using structures and categories that just don't exist in other languages.

That statement might give people the idea that Latin is some sort of UFO language having nothing in common with any other human language. That isn't true, of course. Latin shares a number of features with other languages, including some modern ones — but, as it happens, I suspect Google Translate isn't very good at translating modern languages that are closer in structure to Latin, either (though it may be slightly better at those than at Latin because of larger coropora and words for modern concepts being readily available in those languages).

 

[Callaina]

True; I should have said in "the most widely-used modern languages" or such.

 

[Callaina]

Though I do have to wonder whether the sheer periodicity/subordination of Classical Latin is found, to the same extent, in any modern language.

 

[Godmy]

I will just add (something aside the automated translator question which I think was well answered by Callaina): if you need a quick check, you can do it like I did. My main text, when I was a beginner, was the "Familia Romana" book from Hans Oerberg which later on turns out to be quite a good multilinear read. I picked some chapter from the middle, I retranslated it quite literally (even with preservering the Latin word order) into my language (my language also has conjugations and declensions), then I translated it back to Latin without looking. Then I compared the two versions, I counted the serious mistakes (not just aberrations, but serious mistakes) and if the mistake count was, I don't know, above 4, I would do the to-Latin translation part again and so many times until I was reproducing the correct Latin faithfully (with some mild aberrations in word choice etc.). This way I learnt to write Latin quite without mistakes and use the idioms and grammar correctly. We call it "a back-translation" or "double-translation".

Otherwise the existence of such automated translator would equal to the existence of perfect general artificial intelligence (comparable to human brain) which has not [yet] been developed. Only then such automated translators will start to be a possibility, until then it's an utter utopia in IT. And when that happens, you will know it. Nobel prizes will be given...

 

[Callaina]

if you need a quick check, you can do it like I did...I picked some chapter from the middle, I retranslated it quite literally (even with preservering the Latin word order) into my language (my language also has conjugations and declensions), then I translated it back to Latin without looking. Then I compared the two versions

Just wanted to avoid a potential point of confusion here, given the earlier discussion -- when Godmy talks about translating the text here, he means that he himself is translating it, not that he is using some automated translator to do so (for either the translation from Latin into his own language, or back into Latin).