Introduction to Blitz Latin

Blitz Latin 2 is here!

Overview

A big step forwards in translation quality, massively tested by the author and his team and with no crashes.

The new Blitz Latin 2 includes about 9,500 Latin Standard Phrases. These enhance translations by substituting where applicable. The full file is only available to registered users. It is compatible with the Botanical Dictionary released last year.

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. An additional dictionary of botany terms was released in October 2012. 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 basic electronic dictionary contains more than 43,000 words (including the Catholic/Vatican and modern sub-dictionaries). With the supplemental medieval dictionary the total is 47,000 words, and with the botany dictionary add-on 51,000 words. These are words as they would be counted in a paper dictionary, i.e. not counting the very many inflected variants of nearly every word. There are nearly 3.5 million words if inflections are counted. It covers all eras from antiquity to modern times. As well as the separate medieval dictionary there is a 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.

• 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.
• Inscript is an extremely fast means for searching the database of inscriptions held at Frankfurt University.
• 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.

• by the application of artificial intelligence to grammar matching and word scoring.
• the frequency with which a word is used in one mode or another is taken into account.
• the era from which the text came can be specified - classical, medieval or both.
• the area from which the text came, currently eight classifications such as botanical, medical, ecclesiastical.
• 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:

• to make intelligent guesses at many unknown words, found by experience to be the most likely to be calculable.
• to translate Latin inscriptions as presented in Frankfurt University’s database.
• to assign mis-spelled medieval words phonetically.
• spell-checking of one or more Latin files.
• to assign some ambiguous Latin words, such as plaga, according to context with a neural network.
• ability for the user to add short, pre-translated, phrases that Blitz Latin will incorporate, such as the res publica example quoted above.
• 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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Who will benefit?

Who will benefit from fast Latin Translation?

• Anyone who wants translation of Latin text for which no expert English translation is available. For example, translation of little-known Latin authors, Latin fragments and Latin inscriptions (at www.manfredclauss.de).
• Anyone who wishes to translate medieval or legal Latin documents. Blitz Latin has a substantial vocabulary of common medieval and legal Latin words; also a large sub-dictionary for translation of medieval Latin music files - for example, at www.music.indiana.edu/tml/. Blitz Latin also employs phonetic word checking for badly (mis)spelled medieval Latin words. A substantial additional 4,000-word medieval dictionary containing all the most common medieval Latin inventions will be supplied free to those who register use of Blitz Latin.
• Anyone who wants to read modern Latin texts. More Latin has been written in the last 50 years than in all previous history. Blitz Latin now incorporates the "Calepinus Novus" dictionary (courtesy of Guy Licoppe, Melissa Foundation, Belgium) for modern words, such as the Latin for car and aeroplane.
• Anyone who wishes to read Vatican/Catholic/ecclesiastical Latin. The -E suffix of Blitz Latin variants denotes the presence of more than 2,000 stems dedicated to this purpose.
• Anyone who wishes to discover the meaning of rare or irregular Latin words. Irregular stems can be hard to locate in a conventional Latin dictionary.
• Anyone who wishes to translate Latin text computer-scanned from a Latin text book. Blitz Latin is very robust when confronted with typical scanning errors.
• Anyone who wishes to translate the Latin text files available at "http://www.theLatinLibrary.com" or at "http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch".
• Researchers with a large collection of Latin files (eg down-loaded from the Latin Library/Augsburg) can investigate every occurrence of a key word or the global usage of individual Latin stems, with printed local context and user-selected information about how the stem is used.

Click HERE to see a list of actual uses.

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