Yahoo Babelfish does not offer an option to translate text from LATIN to ENGLISCan LATIN be added?

Question

I am seeing a foreign language that I cannot for certain identify and am speculating it is LATIN which of course is no longer a spoken language so unlikely to be offered as one that would be translatable. But there must be some source for ancient languages that have fallen out of use to translate books such as "The Iliad and The Odyssey" (story of Aeneas) which after studying LATIN for a few years I was able to read-back in the day-

Answer 1

There are some online translators for Latin, but the best is next to worthless. None of the translators for Latin online give 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 anything close to a 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.


Single word translators which show you several possible choices for one word work. One of the best of those is:

http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/showcase/whi...

Your best bet may well be to post here and ask for a translation - breaking it up in smaller sections if it's too long.

Answer 2

No, you can't add Latin, the site owner would have to do it. I strongly doubt they will ever do so.

If you have actually studied Latin for a few years, well enough to read the story of Aeneas (which is Vergil's Aeneid - the two you listed are by Homer, are about Odysseus, and were written in Greek), then you should be able to tell whether or not the language is Latin.

As for a source to translate books written in Latin or Greek, they would NEVER use something so inaccurate as an online translator. Latin and Greek are both inflected languages and online translators are not able to translate them with any degree of accuracy. Real live people with a thorough knowledge of the language translate these works.