14 - Translating from Latin into English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
The key steps are:
(1) work out the part of speech of each word, i.e. is it a noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, verb?
(2) for a noun, find its Declension, gender and case
(3) for an adjective, determine which noun it is associated with.
This process is called parsing, i.e. describing a word or series of words grammatically (see above).
If you are unfamiliar with Latin, there is no alternative, to begin with, to looking up each word in the vocabulary. There is no problem with a noun or adjective in the nominative singular, since this is the case under which they are listed. If the word is in another case, you will usually find it by looking it up as it is spelt in the description, since the stem (even if you don’t recognise it as such) will lead you to the correct word. In our Vocabulary we have tried to anticipate the difficulty of those words that change their form markedly when declined, and have listed the latter, with a cross-reference to the nominative singular entry.
Remember that, in Latin it is usual for adjectives to follow the noun they describe, and that a verb (even as a participle) goes at the end of its phrase, clause or sentence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Primer of Botanical Latin with Vocabulary , pp. 101 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013