Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Why does google chrome suck at translating latin?

I mean, even if you input just one word it usually doesn't have a good translation or at least just a translation for that word.

Is it that they don't have enough Latin language speaking workers? or are they too lazy to grab a Latin dictionary and add the words.|||Just grabbing a Latin dictionary and adding the words wouldn't be enough. The reason NO online translation site is very good at Latin is that Latin is a highly inflected language, with at least ten forms for every noun and dozens for every verb. Evidently a computer can't yet understand the intricacies of grammar! So if you ask for a translation of a sentence as simple as "Marcus loves Julia," you'll probably get "Marcus amo Julia," because the program won't know that, as the direct object, "Julia" should be "Juliam" or that the form of the verb for "love" to use with a third-person singular subject is "amat." If you're trying to translate from Latin to English and type in "Marcus Juliam amat," it might give you a good translation, or at least one that would be accurate once you changed the word order from "Marcus Julia loves."



As for actual word meanings, I've been puzzled several times by the definitions I've seen people cite here that they've found on translation sites. However, there ARE free online Latin-English dictionaries that can be helpful if you already know some Latin grammar. I sometimes use one when I'm away from home.



Finally, adding more workers who know Latin won't make any difference unless a translation site actually has people reading each question and responding individually, as the answerers on THIS site do.|||it's machine translation - i.e. done by software, not by "Latin speaking workers" [comic idea] If you are haviug problems translating Latin, is it because you are too lazy to consult a dictionary, or simply too mean to buy one? a simple dictionary adequate for school-level Latin [though not good enough for uni] is very cheap, and readily available secondhand.



in general, people don;t speak Latin - they learn it to read the literature.
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