Why isn there a good Latin translator on the Web?
I’ve played with Japanese-to-English software that has actually been kind of “cool”. It was not anything that would give you a real translation, but you could still get a good feel for what the text was talking about. Very useful when you know all of about 6 kanji (and that’s six more than the average American….) Now, with Latin, if you’re an educated English speaker, you really ought to be able to just look at the text and at least get a feel for what the subject matter is. If there were software to do the same thing with Latin that my old Japanese software did, it would tell you that aqua = water….which, really, people oughta know already…plus just a little basic grammar. The other side of it is that when you dig into Tacitus or Horace or somebody, and you face absolute constructions, dative of agent, passive periphrastic, and all the joys of 3rd-year Latin, that’s stuff that I really would hate to have to code into software. Way too many nuances. I’d be much happier to keep th
