How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin? • Hacker News Board

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#251

Post by tail_exchange » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #236

elliottkember wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at all

Neither do the majority of the translations. For some reason, it's fine to lose most of the meaning when translating to Portuguese or Latin for simplification - but it's not okay to just simplify in English.

That's not true. What you provided completely changes the meaning, whereas the translation I provided only loses one detail (the speaker's genre) without altering the meaning.

One thing you should consider is that, in English, you cannot omit the "she" pronoun without making the sentence incorrect or unclear, since modern English does not have declensions for the grammatical person. But in other languages it is not only correct, but speakers do drop the pronouns when they speak. This is what the commenter was referring to when they said "That translation strikes me as overly literal, trying to keep a match for each English word. I'd go more idiomatic with this.".

I agree that the translation I provided is not 100% word-for-word perfect, since it drops a detail while trying to maintain the original message and compress it as much as possible, but saying that it lost most of its meaning is very unfair.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#252

Post by justinator » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #150

I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it. I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.

Let’s hope not- Maroon 5’s songwriting is not known to be… good.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#253

Post by sharikous » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

academia_hack wrote: post #100

I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order. This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the stru…

The more elaborate books of the Bible, like Isaiah/Yeshayahu and Psalms/Tehillim, make use of this kind of structure a lot in the original. You can easily find "triple chiasms" with structure ABCCBA. I don't know why this isn't emphasised usually.

Catullus of course is one of the masters. There is also the "da mi basia mille deinde centum..." that has the structure of an abacus

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#254

Post by sandyarmstrong » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #150

I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it. I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.

That was my first thought as well. Ah, to be young again!

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#255

Post by h4ckerle » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

tetris11 wrote: post #41

nicbou wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for very specific uses, like user manuals.

to dare → herausfordern Eng: "I dare you to drink that" Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken." Almost double

Shortest translation that comes to my mind would be: "Ich fordre dich zum Trunk." Which IMO translates the original sentence pretty well. You could add a "heraus" at the end but as a native I would not say that it is necessary. Also the Word "Trunk" sounds a bit antiquated but Duden still lists it, therefore I'd say it's fair game.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#256

Post by z2 » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #139

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #13

Would Latin GPT come up with that 2 word phrase?

GPT4 response: You can translate the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit vale saepe nimis antea". I asked GPT4 whether it could make the translation shorter to which it responded that Latin was inherently a verbose language, so no.

For what it's worth, I asked the same two questions to GPT 3.5 and got:

Yes, in Latin, you can say "multum vale" to mean "goodbye many times" or "vale nimis" to mean "goodbye too much"

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#257

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #150

I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it. I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.

[deleted]

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#258

Post by ana_winters » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

academia_hack wrote: post #100

I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order. This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the stru…

[flagged]

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#259

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone experiencing the meaning behind these words (a guy talking about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn't believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual phrase he says may be completely different. Because while English speakers (specifically, American English speakers, or even more specifically wherever the songwriter is from, looks like it's Los Angeles) reach for this particular phrase to convey this meaning, this is very idiomatic when you think about it.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#260

Post by lr4444lr » Wed, Sep 06, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

Eh... this is a really idiomatic expression in English. Maybe if you rummage Plautus or Terrence, perhaps even the epistolary corpus of Pliny or Cicero, you could chance upon something sentimentally accurate, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Grammatically accurate word for word reconstructions aren't really going to convey it.