A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:12 PM UTC

philsnow wrote: post #33

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…

“Translation of each word” is also called a “gloss”, and I think it’s absolutely vital for trying to read works in translation. Lots of words and phrases have multiple meanings and connotations in their origin language and it’s not usually possible for a translation to bring the richness into the target language. (I’m going to butcher this because I don’t have the text in front of me, but) Thomas Aquinas composed sev…

> The choice of the word “fer” isn’t the most obvious choice for “bring”, though.

Well, if you asked me how to say "bring" in Latin, that would be my first choice, and the irregularity of the verb tells us that it's very common in general, though not necessarily for this.

Lewis and Short has "In general, to bear, carry, bring"; "In particular, to move, bring, lead, conduct, drive, raise", which seems to hit the concept of "bringing help" squarely in the center. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=fero&la=la#lexi...

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

#52

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

Timwi wrote: post #24

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 love this mode of reading very much. I think this could be great for any language, not just Latin, and any target language, not just English. The only difficulty is sourcing good texts that are both fun to read and also suitable for language learning at various levels of skill.

I've been working on a tool to display the structure (and glosses) of a text. All the structural and definitional annotation is provided by me based on personal knowledge. So far I have most of a single short fable in Mandarin Chinese done. ;D

Does this sound like something you'd be interested in checking out?

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

#53

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

thom wrote: post #30

This is nice! I do use ChatGPT a fair amount as I’m still crap at Latin and Greek, but a lot of scholarship just plonks it in untranslated. It has always worked fine for getting the gist. I am extremely lucky in that while moving house my wife allowed me to buy the complete Loeb collection but until then I spent a lot of time on Tufts’ Perseus library. The Latin and English sources (and Greek for that matter) are all…

Perseus seems to be slowly falling apart; I think it's unmaintained. I also think there's supposed to be a more current replacement. But that's as far as my knowledge goes; do you know more?

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

#54

Post by randomcatuser » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

Wow, I like this design. Somehow you picked just the right font size combination so that I can focus on the Latin (but still the English is accessible)

I can imagine a click interaction (click on a word/phrase, learn more about the grammar, etc). What kind of interactions would people like for reading texts like this?

(this is so useful for Chinese too!)

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

#55

Post by randomcatuser » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

vitus wrote: post #37

I think it's a useful start, but I for one still prefer consulting a dictionary on the side (e.g. Whitaker's Words -- https://latin-words.com/ ) to make sure I get the nuances and make sure I parse the individual words correctly. The first thing that stood out to me with the translation is that it goes word-by-word, and doesn't have any room for ambiguity. For instance, in the first line, "profectus est" is the third…

Learned something new. It's incredible that you have this kind of detail... do you think there's a UX that can help readers learn more/explore this kind of ambiguity?

I think the interlinear is realy good at showing one translation (and isn't super distracting) -- do you imagine more like footnotes/etc type things?

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

#56

Post by 1-more » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

utf_8x wrote: post #7

TIL the sentence structure of Latin is wild

the difference, if you're looking to dive deeper into this, is that English is a more analytic language, and Latin is a more synthetic language. In Latin you mostly alter the form of the words to match their meaning. In English you mostly change order and add auxiliary words to change meaning. I'm qualifying these with "mostly" because nothing is all one way or all another, generally.

Word order does matter a bit in Latin, but much less than it does in English. "Dog bites man" and "man bites dog" are different due to word order. In Latin you can write "canis hominem mordet" in _any_ order and have it mean "dog bites man" because that's the only thing those nouns in those cases can mean. To do "man bites dog" you have to say "homo canem mordet" (again, in any order). Conventionally, though, you end a sentence or a subordinate clause with its verb, and the subject that matches up with a verb is usually the one closest to space-wise.

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

#57

Post by Mobius01 » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

I really enjoyed this. You made a great choice in typography and the relative size where the English translations do not interfere with the original Latin text. I hope you can continue.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by araes » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

The web design's relatively minimalistic and clean. Saw the ruby annotation thing a bit ago in the HTML spec. Seems like there's lots of applications for them that don't get used.

Anybody happen to know of a Latin OCR software that could grab the text parts from Latin documents? Have an interest in translating the Etymologiae of bishop Isidore of Seville, since its one of the main reference texts for education in the middle ages. Just 280 pages of Latin's a bit much for hand copying to text files.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae

[2] Archive.org https://archive.org/details/etymologiaeaddde00isid

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

#60

Post by hombre_fatal » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

Meh, when you say Duolingo isn't great, you should compare it to something in its same class. I don't think Duolingo competes with sitting down with a grammar book. The whole reason I used Duolingo, which got me up to speed with Spanish enough to read books, is that I could do it anywhere and any time rather than bust out a book for serious study. I was never going to do that, so Duolingo was strictly better for learning a language than a book.

People lose track of that every time they dunk on Duolingo.