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A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

adi.earth

61–70 of 71 posts

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

#61
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?

It does seem under resourced. Version 5 never appeared and I don’t know what 6 is supposed to look like. It’s still a great online resource, but having my own library, and access to the Hellenic and Roman Library in London, I’m happy to take things slow these days.

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

#62
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?

I know various e-readers have the ability to look up unfamiliar words or phrases in a dictionary by tapping on them, so you can focus on only looking up things that you don't know, or look for another definition for some word if the definition you have doesn't quite fit. For instance, I would probably need to revisit my parse in that first sentence, "Arion, since he (or perhaps some unspecified deed? but why not the ablative absolute here?) was accomplished abroad, ..." using proficio as "has been accomplished" instead of proficiscor for "departed"); looking up profectus in a dictionary would yield the other base word.

I also wonder about jotting down translation notes while reading -- when seriously trying to translate a text, writing down notes in the margins or between lines (if there's appropriate spacing) helps a ton. At least until you're familiar with the grammar and the constructions, laboring through the translation is a huge help.

For someone like me who is reasonably familiar with the grammar, but might be rusty on the actual vocabulary (having last needed to use it in any semi-serious context more than a decade ago), I could see myself referring to the existing app's translation on occasion to give me some ideas regarding the actual words. But I don't know how helpful it is for someone newer to the language, who'd need more than just vocab.

Another commenter also mentions the possibility of pairing the Latin text with a well-established English translation. That might also be interesting; I could certainly muddle my way through a translation without knowing the grammar, but I would make plenty of mistakes if I didn't stop to think about cases and verb forms. What I think would help most is to perform a surface reading, followed by a refinement to make the text more idiomatic.

For instance, taking one of the sentences in the second paragraph: "Pecunia omni nautis oblata, vitam deprecatus est." My surface reading would look something like... "With all money offered to sailors, he begged his life." I might then refine that to "Having offered the sailors all of his money, he begged for his life."

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

> preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses)

A couple of points:

- If you natively speak a Romance language, learning Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.

- Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any other Indo-European speakers.

- You might be interested to know that while Mandarin verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle does, so you have to observe a distinction between past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.

我不理解 I don't understand

我没有理解 I didn't understand

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

#64
post #22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used this method too and found several misstakes, it can be pretty gross mistakes where tone shift is not detected by choosing the wrong words. Idioms and fixed phrases are the hardest I guess. Usually I can get an explanation if I ask four-ten follow up questions it can be really hard to get it right. I hope you are not missing mistakes, and that it is just how I use it that makes it such a burden for me. I have t…

The accuracy of the results might depend on the language you’re reading, the LLM you’re using, the nature of the text, and the amount of context you give to the LLM. When I’ve tested the best models with more or less standard texts, such as excerpts from novels or news articles, in English, Japanese, and Russian, the results have been extremely good. The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are able to expl…

As a learning tool it works ok as long as you keep vigilant. When lose the original text though or become over reliant on the LLM results you will make mistakes. I will agree as long as you have lots of contexts the mistakes will be few, but in real human communication context might change fast and span multiple medias.

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

#65

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…

I just wish Duolingo would move faster.

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

#66

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?…

I think there is a big difference between learning a living language versus a classical language like Latin or Ancient Greek. The point of learning a living language is to learn practical ways to communicate. While there are tiny communities of people who enjoy talking in classical languages, the vast majority of people learning a classical language do so to read real classical texts in the original.

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

#67

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…

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 lear…

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

This, people want so badly to shit on stuff online that they don't consider that different people have different wants and needs.

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

#69

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…

Thank you for creating this. I took Latin in HS (over 30 years ago!) and would like to brush up.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?…

I think there is a big difference between learning a living language versus a classical language like Latin or Ancient Greek. The point of learning a living language is to learn practical ways to communicate. While there are tiny communities of people who enjoy talking in classical languages, the vast majority of people learning a classical language do so to read real classical texts in the original.

I'm not sure how this responds to my comment?
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