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Google Translate: Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5496 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 1 of 6 04 October 2010 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Alpha version released on Friday Oct. 1.
My prediction: As much as I love Google Translate when used properly (quick word reference, translating sentences that one really can't figure out, etc.), it is my prediction that there will be an exponential increase in the number of trying-to-look- cool mistranslated Latin tattoos. Translate Blog Edit: Added blog link. Edited by canada38 on 04 October 2010 at 12:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 04 October 2010 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I liked the blog post in Latin. And not least the job title of Mr. Bayer, "master of space and time". However this isn't the first Latin translator on the internet.
I have tried to make a Google search and (re)found for instance www.latinphrasetranslation.com, which doesn't really make a translation - instead it makes words in the Latin text 'hoverable' (meaning that you see translation alternatives in a box when you hover above a word). It also deals with inflected words. Nifty little thing. Babylon also claims to have a translator, but I haven't downloaded it Intertrans also has got a translator, but as it freely admits you have to be patient to use it. It locked up when I asked it to translate "ego hic sum" (mearning "I am here"). Maybe it got scared. www.translation-guide.com has a more Google-like' alternative, insofar that it translates text passages and homepages. But at least I got a result ("I this to be" (!)). Maybe it confused my phrase with "Ego hoc sum" ? The newborn Google baby gives the translation "I will remain here I am" - the last 3 words would be enough, but although somewhat verbose the thing at least knows what I'm speaking about. So when ingeniarius Jakob Uszkoreit and spacetime master Ben Bayer get that fixed the newborn Google baby may become a welcome addition - especially when it grows up and learns some Latin. Edited by Iversen on 04 October 2010 at 1:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6604 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 6 04 October 2010 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Although it's not strictly a "translator", the free online tool No Dictionaries can be helpful to almost any student of Latin literature. Rather than providing a single word-by-word lookup, it instead generates word lists for an entire text and displays them line by line.
And speaking of Latin tattoos gone awry, visit "Latin Tattoos Gone Awry" -- one of several sites devoted to this painful topic. Edited by magister on 04 October 2010 at 4:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 4 of 6 05 October 2010 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
In my opinion there is no way to use it properly. If you want a quick word reference, there are other resources that are far more valuable and accurate. If you really can't figure out a sentence, what makes you think a machine can do it? Perhaps the machine will spit out something that seems to fit the context, so you assume it's correct... except the original text said the opposite. Oops. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5496 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 5 of 6 06 October 2010 at 3:03am | IP Logged | ||
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No, it can be used properly. For example, anyone can type in "You + verb + etc." and get
a seemingly good sentence. One example, however, is when translating Romance languages (I'm sure this case applies to many others as well). Entering "You" and wanting singular you will almost always give an erroneous result, because it translates as the plural (vous, vosotros, etc.) However, if one enters "thou", he will get the equivalent in the Romance languages (tu, tú, etc.) My point: While Google Translate (and any other machine) are not as good as human translation, especially when it comes to idioms and complex ideas, there are ways to correctly extract the information one wants if the right precautions are taken. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 6 06 October 2010 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Google translate has one smart use. Take a translated page in your target language and copy-paste it into Word as text - then you get an interlaced text with target language sentences interspersed with their translations, typically in the standard language of your computer.
The idea is not hat you should believe everything in the translation, but use it as a series of hints to your own interpretation of the original text (using a dictionary when you are suspicious about something or want some more information). Of course this helping hand is superfluous if you are better at the target language than Google is, and you also have to know a minimum about the target language so that you can spot erroneous translations, but even with those caveats such a translation can be precisely the thing that makes it possible for you to understand the original text correctly - and paradocially this functions even if the translation is full of errors. I would always prefer a bad machine translation to a prettified 'free' translation made by a human. The machine is too dumb to hide its errors, while the human translator is a mischievous being who tries to hide that there ever was an original text in a different language. Edited by Iversen on 06 October 2010 at 10:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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