Introduction to Blitz Latin

Blitz Latin overview (currently version 1.80, released April 2012)

Blitz Latin is a stunningly fast Latin to English translation program allowing you to skim through large volumes of text - a particularly useful feature if you are a researcher. For very detailed product information click on Download and Revision History.

Blitz Latin has a huge knowledge of Latin words. The only unknown words (excepting proper names) that will be encountered with Blitz Latin will be those with a frequency of fewer than four occurrences across the range of files containing 5 million+ words listed in the 'Accuracy'' tabbed section below. The electronic dictionary comprises well over 40,000 Latin words as they would be counted in a paper dictionary. The 50,000 (including optional paid-for medieval and botany dictionaries)". The addition of inflections to each word increases the total of discrete Latin words to perhaps three and a half million. It covers all eras from antiquity to modern times. There is a separate medieval dictionary and set of medieval translation rules to handle this distinct area of Latin.

Blitz Latin is flexible. You can select specific eras (classical or medieval) and specific areas (biological/medical, ecclesiastical, grammatical, legal, miltary, NeoLatin, scientific/technical, theatre/music/poetry) to improve the accuracy of the translation. You can select detailed output which shows all the alternative meanings to teach of the translated words. If you choose to see Blitz Latin's single preferred translation, you can still click on individual words and see a comprehensive Latin glossary of alternative meanings.

Three additional free modules add to the value of Blitz Latin for researchers.

1. HTMStrip provides a fast and convenient method to strip the non Latin formatting text from HTML web pages to obtain 'clean' text ready for translation.
2. Inscript is an extremely fast means for searching the database of inscriptions held at Frankfurt University.
3. Counter is a program that counts Latin words in a text, and provides statistical analysis of word densities in sentences, and standard deviations. This is a method used to help identify authors.

Please explore the rest of this site, particularly the Translation Tips menu which has useful information about how to get the best from Blitz Latin. Click shop to buy Blitz Latin and download to try it for free.

Special features

Special features for Latin translation

Latin has significantly different translation requirements to a modern language. This is because there are many more ambiguities and the word order is usually based on the emphasis desired for the words rather than the subject/verb/object of modern European languages.

Ambguity is catered for in a variety of ways.

1. by the application of artificial intelligence to grammar matching and word scoring.
2. the frequency with which a word is used in one mode or another is taken into account.
3. the era from which the text came can be specified - classical, medieval or both.
4. the area from which the text came, currently eight classifications such as botanical, medical, ecclesiastical.
5. the use of common double word phrases such as 'res publica' for state.

Word order is catered for by allowing Blitz Latin to identify the probable word type. You can then leave Blitz Latin to display it in the way it thinks best reflects the meaning, or you can specify the modern language layout of Subject/Verb/Object (SVOE), Verb/Subject often suited to medieval texts. 'No re-ordering' can sometimes help when the others fail.

Blitz Latin additionally includes the ability:

1. to make intelligent guesses at many unknown words, found by experience to be the most likely to be calculable.
2. to translate Latin inscriptions as presented in Frankfurt University’s database.
3. to assign mis-spelled medieval words phonetically.
4. spell-checking of one or more Latin files.
5. to assign some ambiguous Latin words, such as plaga, according to context with a neural network.
6. ability for the user to add short, pre-translated, phrases that Blitz Latin will incorporate, such as the res publica example quoted above.
7. to obtain a Latin glossary of individual Latin words simply by clicking on them.

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Accuracy

Blitz Latin's quality testing

More than 4,000 files were used to develop and test Blitz Latin. The result is that all words that occur more than four times in these 4,000 files will be recognised. The only unknown words (excepting proper names) that will be encountered with Blitz Latin will be those with a frequency of fewer than four occurrences across all the range of files listed above. Most less-frequent words will also be translated.

The program has been tested without failure on multiple scans of nearly 1,000 Latin texts downloaded from a prime respository for Latin files in HTML format of uncertain accuracy - The Latin Library. The files contain all the works of such well known Latin authors as St. Augustine, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Ovid and Vergil, as well as numerous other files, including fragmentary texts by less well known authors. Thus the file set can be regarded as representative of classical Latin, and contains nearly 5 million Latin words in all.

Other test documents included:

• 0.5 million words from 180 medieval and modern Latin texts at the <www.thelatinlibrary.com> site.
• 1.7 million legal words from Justinian’s Digest/Codex and from Theodosius’ Codex
• 600,000 words from the Vulgate Latin bible, and all the most common words incorporated.
• 3.5 million words from medieval documents (mostly from ‘Augsburg’, see ‘useful Web addresses’) have been translated and all the most common words incorporated.
• 1 million Latin words describing the medieval theory of music (‘TMT project’) have been processed, as well as 600,000 Latin words from Bracton’s medieval Law.
• 7.3 million words from the P.H.I. CD ROM No. 5.3 (many overlapping with the Latin files described above), courtesy of the Packard Humanities Institute, USA. These include all known Latin texts, including fragments but excluding inscriptions, up to about 200 AD, and many subsequent texts.

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