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Archiver > ESSEX-UK > 2005-12 > 1133904367


From: "La Greenall" <>
Subject: RE: [Ess] Latin translation (was RE: Manor documents - On Topic)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 21:26:07 -0000
In-Reply-To: <005801c5faa8$04867ea0$0300a8c0@blueyonder.co.uk>


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dick Mathews [mailto:]
>
>
> The Sep 2005 issue of 'Computers in Genealogy' had an item
> on a piece of of
> software called Blitz Latin, which is an automatic Latin to English
> translator. It is available from www.software-partners.co.uk
> and is "free
> for up to ten uses. After that a GBP29.00 licence is
> required". I haven't
> tried it, but it seems like some people on this list might
> find it useful.

I did try it about a year ago; whilst it claims to be suitable for
medieval Latin I have seen it reviewed as being better at Classical
Latin (i.e. Greek or Roman). However, I tried it on an early 19th
century book full of Latin excerpts from medieval deeds, where the Latin
was mostly written by ill-trained clerics and even iller-trained court
officials (hee hee) who tended to put 'us' or 'um' on the ends of
English words they couldn't translate, and so on! Williamus would be a
good example. Blitz Latin did quite a good job, especially for this user
who wasn't even taught grammer or eng lit at school, let alone anyfing
florin or heddacated! But it will need a lot of input from the user who
will have to use intuition and guesswork to fill in where it falls down.
Basically, it is capable of giving you the basic idea of what a sentence
or phrase is saying, but you'll have to tidy up the way it says it. Its
unusual strong point is that, unlike the one or two competing progs that
exist, it doesn't translate word-by-word, thus getting the contextual
meaning of the words completely a*** about t**, but translates whole
sentences in one go. So long as the original Latin is half-decent of
course, which won't apply to manorial deeds or parish registers very
much!

A small tip: the ten free goes are effectively unlimited in terms of
amount of text per go, so be well-prepared before you get stuck in!
However, there are so many options to flick on and off deep in the
menus, even on the basic way it translates, that you'll still use up all
your lives far too quickly. And anyway, the licence fee is very cheap
for the quality of product IMHO. In many cases the only real alternative
would be professional translation by a human, at several pounds per 100
words or so.

Lawrence Greenall.

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