Google Translate now supports Latin | Hacker News Reader

Google Translate now supports Latin

googleblog.blogspot.com

71 pointsabraham46 comments

Via Google Translate:

That language barriers be torn away and the knowledge of the world is made accessible and useful, translation systems of many languages of the nations were created by us. Today, we announce the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin. Being but a few speak Latin daily, year by year more than a hundred thousand American students receive the National Latin Exam. Besides many people all over the world study Latin.

This Latin translation system rarely be used to translate e-mails or understand the subtitles of YouTube videos. But many that are ancient books of philosophy, of physics and of mathematics are written in Latin. But many thousands of books are in Google Books, who have whole passages in Latin.

Translating by machine from Latin is difficult and our grasp of grammar not without error. The Latin is unmatched because most of them Latin books have already been written and only a few of the new shall be hereafter. Many have been translated into other languages and these translations we use to train our translation system. Since this system translates books well similar to those from whom he learned, our ability to translate famous books (such as The Gallic War Caesar 's) is already good.

The next time you find a Latin passage or you need help with the Latin writings, try this.

Jakob Uszkoreit, Software Engineer

Time to put 'Ingeniarius Programmandi' on my CV.

Interesting I was testing it with Lorem ipsum text and the results are:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi sapien leo, dictum a iaculis ut, tincidunt et ante. Nullam tristique lectus ut felis malesuada suscipit. Proin id dui sapien, malesuada ullamcorper ipsum. "

"Hello world! Is here to cancel meals. Diseases of the sapien a lion, it was said by clicking that, before the Runs on. The bed so that no sad Felis malesuada to raise up. Consequently, her s it your the sapien, malesuada ullamcorper itself."

You might want to note that the most common "lorem ipsum" you find as filler text is actually an incorrect quoting of a work by Cicero. The actual text from Cicero might yield better results.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

Funny. Yesterday ( http://i.imgur.com/oKQsd.png ) I needed to have something translated from Latin. It didn't work, I was disappointed and today they fixed it. Google must have read my mind.

Easter Egg: http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/3834/ishot1j.jpg

isn't it more likely someone or a group of people "contributed" this bad translation.

it doesn't even make sense.

To try to break the tool, I ran DJB's article on IPv6 [0] to Latin and back[1]. Impressively, most of the phrases translated, but they lost most of their semantic meaning. Double-translations are still heavily influenced by the language of the second text - the text picked up lots of "servant," "slave," and "prayer" references. There were some extra problems introduced: D.J. Bernstein became J.D. Bernstein, for instance.

Most of the semantics-wrecking errors were of the same type: failing to pick a correct definition from context. Here's a paragraph from the original:

   Problem: There are only a few billion public IPv4 addresses. Many of those 
   addresses have already been allocated. What happens when we run out of 
   public IPv4 addresses?

And here's the double-translation:

   PROBLEM there are few billion IPv4 addresses of the State. And many of them
   attributed to prayer now. What happens when we run, from the public IPv4 
   addresses?

The only significant error in the first sentence is "public" => "of the State." The second sentence is also mostly intact, but has one of the spurious Latin-introduced phrases, "prayer." The error in the third sentence is very minor, but enough to make the entire translation meaningless.

Overall, I'm impressed that it attempts to translate so many technical phrases. I'm not impressed by their web interface - the "contribute a better translation" tooltip makes it impossible to copy individual lines or paragraphs in Chrome.

[0] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

[1] http://pastebin.com/B73w7nPT

This will make adding placeholder text to UI mockups significantly more fun.

Fun fact: Lorem Ipsum comes from Cicero!

"Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

I wish they'd add Basque. I actually have a few riders on http://bikechatter.com who tweet in Basque, and it's impossible to figure out what they're saying.

Basque as a language should die. Spain should stop trying to maintain disparate legacy languages used only by a few hundreds of thousands (if that) of people.

Legitimate opinion, but severely offtopic.

We should all speak Mandarin in the future.

Here in Idaho, with the largest concentration of Basque short of the EU (might be larger, not sure), such a thing would be an excellent idea. I grew up wondering what people were saying and it always sort of drove me nuts :) These days when they say it electronically a translation either way would be magical!

Basque is already there.

I don't see it among the languages to 'translate from' here:

http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

It is available as "Google in your language", but that doesn't help me at all.

It's showing up for me in Google Translate:

http://i.imgur.com/8rPf8.png

Try http://translate.google.com instead of the Language Tools interface.

Interesting. In any case, it's not being auto-detected (which shouldn't be hard, given it's pretty unique in the world) and translated via their API:

http://bikechatter.com/main/foruser/304/izainsausti

"romanes eunt domus" -> "of the house of the Romans are going"

Sorry. Couldn't resist. :)

Now write it out a hundred times!

"Romani ite domum" becomes "of the Roman go home".

Noun cases aren't quite perfect, but this is still a fantastic tool.

Prediction: an influx of Latin students make English <-> Latin the most popular translation option.

Hah. I was thinking I would have been sorely tempted by this in high school latin.

obviously there's a lot of variation between teachers, but I think this will only work for kids who wouldn't have tried in the first place. my HS latin teacher would probably have given those a B- or more likely a C. not bad, not great.

Playing around with some common latin phrases, I think I just found an Easter Egg, or quite an odd mistranslation:

http://translate.google.com/#la|en|quid%20pro%20quo

Edit: and reverse-engineering from the english -> latin translator, we can finish the phrase:

http://translate.google.com/#la|en|quid%20pro%20quo%20Pro%20...

I don't know whether or not "quid pro quo Pro Quo manet" is actually sensible Latin or not, but something tells me that "What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas" isn't the most accurate translation.

Wow finally! I've been trying to bang around using http://www.translation-guide.com/free_online_translators.php... but really run into problems at times with it. It's not too often one needs to translate Latin in general, but when you do...

This is pretty amazing: http://i.imgur.com/PTpXW.png

But it sounds like they used the Italian pronunciation engine for text-to-speech, judging by the 'v's and 'c's.

It's probably using "Church" or Italianate Latin -- i.e., Latin as spoken in the Vatican -- as opposed to academic Latin.

I like the fake-parchment effect you get if you translate from something --> Latin.

I thought that was supposed to be marble. Of course, to be complete, they should use only capitals and apply an emboss effect.

Entering famous quotations probably short-circuits the translator, at least that's how it looks like when you're entering something like "I came, saw, conquered".

Magistra from Latin class will not like this ;) With all/most our texts online already, this will make homework a simple copy-and-paste affair..

Oh yes yes yes. At last. I can use this much.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

Uh oh, someone might figure out what 'sine laude' means on my brother's resume!

When I let Google translate auto-detect the language it chose Norwegian. After manually switching to latin it translated 'sine laude'.

res ipsa loquitur, or does it?

Quid?!

The Extremes of Good and Evil, by Cicero.

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Opening of the Aeneid:

I sing of arms and the man, Troy 's who was the first from the shores of Italy, a fugitive of fate, left the Trojan shore, a lot of having been tossed on both land and sea by the force of the cruel of the mindful that leads on high because of the anger; much in war too endured it until they found a city, and bring his gods to Latium, whence the Latin race , the Alban fathers, and the high walls of Rome.

which isn't too bad, actually, especially as I've never really heard a satisfactory translation of "I sing of arms, and the man who..." which is not a sensible sort of English sentence structure.

I am just reading Lombardo translation. Google does not do well with this famous line: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt --> "there are tears for things, and our mortal matters touch the"

It should be more like: "Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience."

http://hiddensymmetries.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/sunt-lacrim...

This is Beta I know but; same sentence translated from English to Latin does not translate back to the same English:

Believers of a religion perceive their religion as true knowledge --> Credentes religio religionis sentiunt verae --> Those who give the religion of the true religion, they feel it

You'll never find an automatic translation program which spits out exactly the same text after a double translation.

(or alternatively)

Never the automatic translation to know what the purpose of exactly the same place he rejects it according to a twofold translation.

Perhaps; but in the case of English-French-English Google translator does pretty well:

You'll never find an automatic translation program which spits out exactly the same text after a double translation --> Vous ne trouverez jamais un programme de traduction automatique qui crache exactement le même texte, après une double traduction. --> You will never find a machine translation program that spits out exactly the same text after a double translation.

If they could bring English-Latin translation to English-French translation level I think that would be acceptable.

Hmm, the French version is actually pretty well done.

Perhaps it's an intrinsically harder problem, though, because Latin's grammar is less English-like?

Still, you're probably right in that the Latin version is just significantly worse than the French.

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