McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Latin Translations
Starbeam:
Except that being able to read Latin and translate it into English doesn't mean you'll be able to translate English into Latin and get it correct, so it doesn't matter how much or how many books you buy and learn from. And as far as I could tell looking at the description of Wheelock, it was the same as every translation I've done for Latin classes. Latin to English.
Shecky:
--- Quote from: Starbeam on August 04, 2009, 10:34:25 PM ---Except that being able to read Latin and translate it into English doesn't mean you'll be able to translate English into Latin and get it correct, so it doesn't matter how much or how many books you buy and learn from.
--- End quote ---
Yet even that is more likely to be accurate and appropriate than a machine translation. A moderately skilled person, when it comes to language, is a far better bet than software.
Example from real life: Guy I knew when I was living in Paris had taken a semester of college French and was gamely trying to describe the high point in his life, when he first met the twin sister who had been adopted away shortly after birth. They ran up to each other, hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. He had been preparing for the story for a while, using a couple of lower-tier bilingual dictionaries (yes, it was that far back; think of them as translation software before Modern Man) that didn't give much context and only gave a list of possible equivalents of each entry. He tried to put into French the sentence, "I rejoiced when I kissed my sister." Because of... oddities in French and because of sheer bad luck in his choice of which option to use, what he DID say came out as equivalent to "I came when I f***ed my sister."
Translation programs STILL don't have a handle on context, which is what tells you precisely HOW to translate each word and phrase. They're okay for comprehending a translation INTO your native language, because assembling the context can give you enough of a picture to make a more informed choice in which option to select. But for translating OUT of your native language and into a language that you are utterly unfamiliar with beyond "Where is the train?" and "Where is the bathroom?", they can't even do this.
Starbeam:
Oh, getting the direct translation between words is easy enough, but English grammar is so screwy to begin with, that I wouldn't even try to translate a sentence into Latin because I know I'd more than likely do it word for word. Might be easier if I knew anything about grammar in other languages.
Shecky:
That's just it - there is almost NEVER such a thing as "word-for-word translation". There's practically never a one-to-one correspondence between an English word and a word in another language. That, not grammar, is why translation is best handled by an experienced human and not by software: most computers simply do not have the capacity for high-volume, fuzzy-logic pattern analysis so easily done by people.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: novium on August 04, 2009, 09:14:03 PM ---I'm just saying: classicists and the classically educated are a rare breed. Even more rare are those fluent enough in Latin to notice anything short of a ridiculously obvious error without having to think about it. So, given the right context, I don't think a little dog latin is going to hurt anyone. Of course, if it's super-important to the plot or setting or in keeping with something previously established*, sure, translation is the way to go.
--- End quote ---
Any error you can avoid making, you should avoid making. It's part of taking writing seriously.
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