A Dutch forum poster requested information on how to translate an Old Dutch expression into Latin in this forum thread. The poster translated
- from Old Dutch
- to German
- to Spanish
- to Latin.
This may be necessary, especially if one's native language doesn't have a good Latin lexicon, like Lewis and Short, but it's fraught with potential problems. Each time you "translate" a word into another language you're getting someone's interpretation.
Here's a modern example:
The Nepali word for a split lentil dish is dal. The word for rice is bhat. If you ask a Nepali for the word for 'meal', he's likely to say dalbhat. To the people of Nepal, lentils and rice are so important that instead of having a 'meal' you have 'lentils-rice'.
Here's a Roman example continuing the meal theme:
The Latin word triclinium refers to the three (tri-) couch (kline inclining) arrangement used for dining. You could say triclinium is the Latin word for the Roman dining room.
When you translate iteratively, you may -- make that stronger -- you probably will wind up where you shouldn't be. In the case of the Dutch translator, instead of winding up with a Latin version of the noun 'brook', the word arrived at was a verb, revolvo. Revolvo comes from a word meaning 'to turn around', but can mean 'to brood'. I think the final consonant /k/ was accidentally replaced with /d/, but it's also possible that by translating from Old Dutch ==> German --> Spanish --> Latin, the word was changed to an unrelated one.
What can you do? A first step would certainly be to check to make sure you have the correct part of speech.
To brood is a verb.If it looks funny, see if there was
A brook is a noun.
Something is fishy.
- a transposition of any letters or
- a misspelling along the way.
One last Latin caveat
Your final product in Latin most likely won't translate into the original sentence of your native language when you put it through a translator in reverse, but the individual nouns, verbs, and perhaps prepositions and conjunctions, should appear related to what you were seeking.
