Latin Forums

[Craftypig]

Can anyone recommend a decent Latin translation website or forum please? I have tried Google translate but lets just say it isn't all its cracked up to be.

[pixie373]

Temeritus est species ut fino abolandat incertos, haesitantias, ego et probrum

boldness is the quality that banishes doubts, hesitation,ego and shame

[pixie373]

Sorry. Say haesitantiam if you want the singular

[Craftypig]

Just to highlight as an example how bad a translator Google is I typed in pixie's translation and it came up with this...

CHANCE is a species that fine abolandat indecision, hesitancy, and I abuse

[vetuste_ennemi]

My school boy version:
Audacia qualitas est quis dubitationem, superbiam et ruborem depellit.
Heaven knows how good that is!

[pixie373]

I agree with you about the online translators. Never used them before, but although i remember the conjugations and declensions -we had to learn them parrot -fashion. I'm a bit rusty on vocab. I put some of those words in translator and it gave verbs instead of nouns and obviously doesn't give the case you want either. Is ok if you recognise what you want when you see it and know which case you want. Definitely not very accurate though

[Craftypig]

vetutse here is a translation of your sentence...

Is any doubt about the quality of courage, pride and shame away.

Is Latin such a hard language that so many translations can be made from one sentence?

[vetuste_ennemi]

Makes better sense than many things I say, CraftPig!

[FredPuli43]

No.Latin is not so imprecise as to give several meanings from one sentence. That's the point of having all those endings and forms in it. The difficulty is the opposite way: a translator often has to ask what precise meaning or nuance the English is trying to convey before the translation can be made.( It is just possible to make puns in Latin but they are very contrived. In the C17 there was a fashion writing Latin mottos which made puns or play on words in Engish;Stephen Perse had "Qui facit per alium facit PER SE "; but that's rather different)

[FredPuli43]

Oh, and if anyone thinks old school solicitors know Latin, no they don't. If they know any it's because they learned some Latin at school, but not necessarily to any more than a basic level. And no lawyer pronounces Latin terms or phrases correctly because these never are said correctly; anyone with Latin has to unlearn the pronunciation they learned at school and learn the legal way, or they'll show themselves to be ignorant beginners.

[atalanta]

You can't use ego ( Latin) to mean ego ( Freudian psychology). In Latin "Ego" has only one meaning, which is "I". "Shame" is better translated as "pudor".
"Temeritas" ( don't know where you got "temeritus - not in my dictionaries) usually means "rashness", not boldness.
A Roman would completely recast that sentence, to say something like " The bold man conquers pride, vanity, shame" - etc
Audax superbiam, dubitationem, pudorem, vanitatemque vincit.

[Peter Pedant]

No we're getting there Craftie

i agree with Atalanta's fruit ( classical froot - geddit ? )

The only problem is.... audax, audacia invites hubris (oops a gk word there !)
so fortune favours the brave - "Fortuna audaces iuvat"
is more properly translated fortuna fortes iuvat

and the ozzer thing is:
would the Romans have said it?

or did they think that bravery - audax and audacia was completely different and unrelated to pride, doubt etc ?

oi laarve de

audacia vincit ................. bit but i think what is conquered aint doubt, ego etc....

cf the American phrase F+=king for virginity,
childhood, yeah, fun, certainly, but virginity ummmmm.....

[Peter Pedant]

do we know what we're talking about ?
well goggle " elegiacs Gallus"
we dug it up - but I have to admit we werent sure what we'd got when we did - it was only later......the classicists jumped up and down

ya-ta-ta-ta multorum templa deorum.....
I remember that day well.....

I would email Anderson - but he's dead.....

[FredPuli43]

PP, in this we need that old standby "Lewis and Short, a Latin Dictionary" because, like the OED for English, it gives every usage and shade of meaning, with quotations, though , of course, you have to have some Latin to understand those. Bit short (or lewis) on jokes, but it does find some words you wonder about: equimulga, a man who milks horses, for example, does create a picture of an aspect of Roman life which you'd never get from Gallic Wars or Ovid.

The grammar you have to learn. Kennedy's Latin Primer is still in print, for masochists. But the latest version omits all those amusing verses: "After si, ne, nisi, num, Quis for aliquis must come" was my favourite, but several had great lists of nouns which had some peculiarity, all fitted into verse. One included "winnowing flail", but for the life of me I can't remember what the Latin for that is nor what its fellow odd nouns were.

And for, what it's worth, I prefer atalanta's approach.

[FredPuli43]

(And, yes, I do know that equimulga looks feminine)

[murraymints]

Latin mass put me off forever....life's too short !

[murraymints]

Fred..how's yooo anyway ?

[FredPuli43]

As at 2 am minty I was tire and off to bed, but fine, thanks

[FredPuli43]

^tired , not tire. No American rubber involved^

[atalanta]

It's not Audacia which verges on hubris, its Superbia.