A great collection of Latin texts you can use to find your next books: https://thelatinlibrary.com/
I suggest using ruby annotations for the translation part.
I am building a sanskrit reader[1] and needed a feature that allowed users to tag words with notes/meaning. ruby annotations work wonderfully for that.
[1] Site: https://www.adhyeta.org.in/
Backend: https://github.com/s-i-e-v-e/adhyeta
(The vocabulary features require a login, which is not open to the public as of yet.)
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 in XML on GitHub, so some enterprising soul could probably hook up a wider set of books from here:
I built a similar thing a while back: https://github.com/katspaugh/interlinear.io
Useful when you're at a very low level of a language. Past B1 or so, it's mostly looking up individual words.
The jargon is „interlinear translation“.
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
I have been using LLMs to restore some of my very rusty Russian reading skills. I give them a text in Russian and ask them to explain it word by word and sentence by sentence, and I ask follow-up questions about parts I am still unsure of. It works quite well, and I haven’t noticed any mistakes yet.
I just tried the same thing with the linked Latin text and Gemini Experimental 1206. The results appear below. Perhaps someone who knows Latin can tell us how accurate the glosses, translations, and grammatical explanations are.
This is really nice, and I hope you continue with additional texts, as I have been trying once again to pick up Latin basics, using YouTube videos and Wheelock's Latin (which is one of the best foreign language books I've ever seen).
It would be nice to be able to add the macrons or even acute accent characters to show emphasis syllables as another toggle-able option -- ChatGPT seemed to do OK with that task for me just now.
There's some intensive spoken Latin course in Rome, I remember reading about it at the time and it sounded totally immersive. It was a follow on from what Fr Foster had run previously (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/father-reginald-foste...).
On my bucket list whenever I win the Powerball and can stop working full time
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!)
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.
Nice, and didn't realise Latin behaves like German by swapping the order of verbs at the end.
TIL the sentence structure of Latin is wild
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-person singular perfect form of the deponent verb "proficiscor" based on context, but it could also be the perfect passive form of "proficio" (which my brain initially gravitated toward, as one of the many derivatives of "facio"). I'd be a bit worried about picking the wrong one if given the word out of context. Or even just picking the wrong translation for a word: for the second sentence, using the word-for-word translation, I might try for "He long was spent at Periander, king of the Corinthians" when "He long dwelled at the house of Periander, king of the Corinthians" would read more naturally, using different translations for "apud" and "versatus erat".
Further, if you don't treat these pairs as holistic verb forms, you get very confused by just reordering words: "Arion, after he is having traveled abroad, ..." vs "Arion, after he traveled abroad, ..." And, it can cause some issues with relative ordering of events (where it's common to move between verb tenses to indicate that some events happened further in the past -- pluperfect vs perfect especially).
And, if you treat "erat" as "was" all the time (as is the case with "versatus erat"), you'll interpret pluperfect (which implies finality) as imperfect.
Later in the first paragraph, I'd run into a little bit of trouble with the ablative absolute ("Ingentibus opibus ibi comparatis"): "Great wealth there acquired" would more literally be translated as "With great wealth having been acquired", or, taking some liberties with the translation, "After he acquired great wealth, ..."
Moving on to the second heading: yes, "ut" is most commonly used as part of a result or a purpose clause with the subjunctive, but a newer reader might not understand why we use the subjunctive here instead of the infinitive. The most literal translation might be "The sailors make a plan such that they might rob and kill that man", but yes, once you're more used to the language, you'd translate it simply as "The sailors make a plan to rob and kill him".
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 only has one book, if I finish it I might add others.
I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good for me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin. This approach will not probably work for more complex texts.
This mode of reading works for me, not sure if is of interest to anyone else.
The app source is on GitHub if you are interested:
https://github.com/aleris/duplex-lectio
A couple of details about the dev process:
https://adi.earth/posts/duplex-lectio-read-latin-bilingual/