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A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

adi.earth

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Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#41

Post by Alex-Programs »

realaleris149 wrote: post #2

After finishing DuoLingo’s Latin course, I wanted to read some Latin texts, but I didn't find easy enough texts and going back and forth to a dictionary was cumbersome. So I created this app for reading basic Latin texts. The idea of the app is to have a Latin text with translation of each word under the paragraph line, which makes it easy to grasp the meaning but also focuses on reading the original Latin text. It o…

If you'd like to try to use Wiktionary instead of OpenAI, you may find this useful:

https://dictionary.nuenki.app/get_definition?language=LatinC...

The code is here: https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-dictionary

However, feel free to use the API for small scale usage; the API can handle ~5 orders of magnitude more requests than it currently receives.

You can see that each word has many different definitions. It's very difficult to do a word-by-word translation that takes context into account, though I'm going to attempt it at some point using a small LLM that merely picks from Wiktionary data for a https://nuenki.app hover mode.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#42

Post by Alex-Programs »

sieve wrote: post #34
aeve890 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How... how does it work?

Ruby annotations?[1] They were originally meant to provide pronunciation hints for Asian languages. The hints naturally float above or below the corresponding word. You do not have to play around with tables/grids/flex to make this happen. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...

+1 to this, they're an excellent little feature. Just bear in mind that the rendering differs substantially by browser, and some fonts (for the ruby text) work better than others. I'd recommend overriding as much as possible, including the font of the ruby text.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#43

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sieve wrote: post #34
aeve890 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How... how does it work?

Ruby annotations?[1] They were originally meant to provide pronunciation hints for Asian languages. The hints naturally float above or below the corresponding word. You do not have to play around with tables/grids/flex to make this happen. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...

What's the function of the non-rendered rp-elements?

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#44

Post by sieve »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #43
sieve wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby annotations?[1] They were originally meant to provide pronunciation hints for Asian languages. The hints naturally float above or below the corresponding word. You do not have to play around with tables/grids/flex to make this happen. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...

What's the function of the non-rendered rp-elements?

Backwards compatibility for browsers that do not support this feature. You put your opening and closing parenthesis tokens within the "rp" tags and such browsers will show the hints within those parentheses.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/rp

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#45

Post by sieve »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #42
sieve wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby annotations?[1] They were originally meant to provide pronunciation hints for Asian languages. The hints naturally float above or below the corresponding word. You do not have to play around with tables/grids/flex to make this happen. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...

+1 to this, they're an excellent little feature. Just bear in mind that the rendering differs substantially by browser, and some fonts (for the ruby text) work better than others. I'd recommend overriding as much as possible, including the font of the ruby text.

I primarily test with Chrome and Firefox (Epiphany, occasionally). And my usecase requires that I provide downloadable fonts as not all fonts have nice-looking Devanagari renderings. So, the overriding happens naturally.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#46

Post by Alex-Programs »

sieve wrote: post #45
Alex-Programs wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this, they're an excellent little feature. Just bear in mind that the rendering differs substantially by browser, and some fonts (for the ruby text) work better than others. I'd recommend overriding as much as possible, including the font of the ruby text.

I primarily test with Chrome and Firefox (Epiphany, occasionally). And my usecase requires that I provide downloadable fonts as not all fonts have nice-looking Devanagari renderings. So, the overriding happens naturally.

Yeah, I also target Chrome and Firefox. I'll occasionally test on Edge.

I had a user report that pinyin was looking funny on Reddit. Turns out they use a system font stack which includes Verdana (and so only shows up on Windows), and Verdana does really poorly with Pinyin ruby (iirc it was a generic ruby thing, not just Pinyin).

I just replaced it with a custom system font stack without Verdana.

Not a difficult fix, but something to be aware of.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#47

Post by dmd »

jrflowers wrote: post #9
realaleris149 wrote: post #2

After finishing DuoLingo’s Latin course, I wanted to read some Latin texts, but I didn't find easy enough texts and going back and forth to a dictionary was cumbersome. So I created this app for reading basic Latin texts. The idea of the app is to have a Latin text with translation of each word under the paragraph line, which makes it easy to grasp the meaning but also focuses on reading the original Latin text. It o…

>I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good for me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin OpenAI also does not know Latin. This is either a tool to troll people that can read Latin or a tool to help people “learn” a made up vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT nondeterministically generated. This only works for a definition of “Latin” that is a sort of vibe wholly detached…

I do know Latin (quite well), and gpt-4o does an extremely good job at translating from English to Latin and vice versa.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#48

Post by nescioquid »

dmd wrote: post #47
jrflowers wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good for me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin OpenAI also does not know Latin. This is either a tool to troll people that can read Latin or a tool to help people “learn” a made up vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT nondeterministically generated. This only works for a definition of “Latin” that is a sort of vibe wholly detached…

I do know Latin (quite well), and gpt-4o does an extremely good job at translating from English to Latin and vice versa.

Note how one opinion provides the warrant for the other.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#49

Post by thaumasiotes »

satvikpendem wrote: post #17
realaleris149 wrote: post #2

After finishing DuoLingo’s Latin course, I wanted to read some Latin texts, but I didn't find easy enough texts and going back and forth to a dictionary was cumbersome. So I created this app for reading basic Latin texts. The idea of the app is to have a Latin text with translation of each word under the paragraph line, which makes it easy to grasp the meaning but also focuses on reading the original Latin text. It o…

Duolingo really isn't good for learning languages. When I learned Latin, I used the immersive method of just starting to read simple texts to more complex ones. The principal book of this form is called Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, I have the color PDF if anyone so needs it. It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story…

> It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes along.

I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple' sentences such as "what do you see?" and "where is your brother?", though I'll note that the subject-auxiliary inversion required by a question of that form isn't exactly a simple concept.

I got them a copy of The Cat in the Hat, and their mother objected that it was too advanced for either of them, because most of the verbs in The Cat in the Hat are in the past tense, which apparently isn't covered within the first four years of Chinese English instruction.

You can't learn what you're not exposed to, but you can learn a lot of what you are exposed to in a language.

Re: A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

#50

Post by satvikpendem »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
satvikpendem wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo really isn't good for learning languages. When I learned Latin, I used the immersive method of just starting to read simple texts to more complex ones. The principal book of this form is called Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, I have the color PDF if anyone so needs it. It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story…

> It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes along. I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple' sentences such as "what do you see?…

Lingua Latina is for adults who already have some base level knowledge of tenses in their own language, preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses), not for children who have no concept of them. Once you start reading the book, it really does start to make sense while teaching you the various forms. It's on Internet Archive if anyone wants to read it: https://archive.org/details/lingva-latina-per-se-ilustrata-p...
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