Subject: Latin help, Part I
Author:
Posted on: 2015-06-13 03:20:00 UTC
First and foremost, major kudos for wrapping your brain around the task of trying to make sense out of the badfic Translatin.
That aside, let's look at how badly the author/Google Translate botched it up now that I have some English to work off of. I want to make this manageable, so I'll chop this into multiple parts.
I'll warn you right now: there will be a lot of grammar terms bandied about. If you have no idea what a word means, please ask.
*ahem*
*taps ruler onto chalkboard*
First off, let's reiterate what our author supposedly meant to write: "protector of those you love, champion/warrior of those who cannot fight for themselves, an angel to watch over everyone."
Now for the Translatin: "tutis illorum vos diligo, proeliator illi quisnam can't pugna pro themselves, angelus ut vigilo super totus."
Before I go on, I must thank Matt Cipher: I had no idea about the term "negative transfer." There's quite a bit of it here, and that term will be quite useful.
Off we go:
1) tutis
First off, I have little idea where GTranslate got tutis. Most likely is that GTranslate tried to use the verb tueor (to protect) or the adjective tutus (safe, protected). However, tutis is nowhere close to meaning "protector." I won't bother you with the possible parsings: suffice it to say that you can conjugate tueor to get tutis, and you can also decline tutus to get tutis as well.
But how to say "protector"? Well, if we want to work off of the verb tueor, the word for protector is tutor.
However, that might throw an Anglophone off, so what other words can we use for "protector"?
A look in any good dictionary (BTW, I highly recommend Whitaker's WORDS; it's the program I use) will give quite a few options. One that would resonate more with English speakers would be defensor. So let's go with that.
2) illorum vos diligo
And we see negative transfer at work: illorum for “of those” (nice job actually declining for once, GTranslate!); vos for “you”, and diligo for “love”.
Illorum for "of those" is actually correct.
Ille is the demonstrative pronoun "that." "Of those [people]" requires ille to be declined to genitive masculine plural. (Just like French, a group of people is referred to by the masculine plural unless the group is composed totally of females.) And the genitive masculine plural of ille is, indeed, illorum.
But that's where GTranslate begins and ends being correct in this clause.
Just like Spanish, personal pronouns are optional for conjugating verbs. And since the speaker is talking to one person, the pronoun used here is wrong. OrangeYoshi picked up on that: vos is plural. The correct pronoun here is tu. But as I said, it is optional; Latin mainly uses the pronoun for emphasis, and we don't need it here.
As for diligo, it seems that this is more fodder for the belief that GTranslate utterly fails at conjugating Latin verbs. Sometimes it tries (and fails), and other times it doesn't even try. This time, it didn't even try.
Go to any Latin dictionary and look up a verb, and you'll find that the entries look something like this: “natō, natāre, natāvī, natatus: swim” The parts that I put in italics are the principal parts of the verb. (Akin to “swim, swam, swum.” in Englishj)
However, unlike other languages' dictionaries, Latin dictionaries' verb entries start with the first person singular present indicative active, as opposed to the present active infinitive.
Why did I say all that? To underscore how wrong GTranslate got it when it simply plugged in diligo for “love.” It would be akin to it plugging in aimer in a French translation. It’s even worse since diligo is a finite verb: it means “I love”! So GTranslate gave “to those protected of those ye I love”—utter nonsense. (Since we’re dealing with a language that distinguishes between singular and plural “you,” I’ll use “thou” and “ye” to distinguish in the English translations.)
So, how to fix it?
First off, we need to expose a word that GTranslate missed because it was hiding in the English. The English is “protector of those you love.” More properly, it’s “protector of those whom you love.” GTranslate missed the “whom.” The relative pronoun in Latin is qui. Here, we need it to be accusative masculine plural: quos.
Next: “you love.” As I said, the pronoun is unneeded. Using diligo for “love”, second person singular present indicative active gives diligis.
OK, I said a lot, so let’s summarize what I’ve said so far.
The English: “protector of those you love.”
The Translatin: tutis illorum vos diligo
The problems:
* tutis is the wrong word, no matter how you slice it
* GTranslate, being not human, did not detect the hidden relative pronoun
* vos is the wrong number
* diligo is conjugated wrong
A correctly-done Latin translation: defensor illorum quos diligis
I won’t add the summary to the later parts, but I will keep a running translation as we go through the sentence.