Friday, January 27, 2012

Does anyone know of any decent latin translators on the net?

I need a latin translator that translates pages to and from latin and english (UK). Anyone know any good ones?|||As previously stated, there are no online translators that will give you a remotely adequate translation for Latin. If you are needing pages of material translated both to and from Latin, you are going to have to hire a translator. There are online services that will do this sort of thing for a fee. The one I have listed below is a UK site. It is not cheap, but Latin has a very complex grammar structure. Quality Latin translations are a lot of work.|||www.freetranslation.com


http://www.levity.com/alchemy/latin/lati鈥?/a>


http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/LatinDictionar鈥?/a>|||Flat answer - NO. None of the translators for Latin produce anything close to a decent translation going either way. There are too many instances where you must know the context before choosing one of the four or five possible word choices. Other problems seem to arise from the high degree of inflection in Latin - the translators just do not seem to get case and number right, and the verbs are just as bad, especially the subjunctive. Seems like the translators assume all is indicative. This is probably compounded by Latin's lack of even semi-fixed word order.





The net result is you get a bunch of nouns and verbs that may or may not be in context, and you still don't know who did what with which to whom when.





EDIT: I really ought to retract the last word above - of all the parts of speech, the translators seem to handle adverbs best.

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