Latin parser and translator 0.

95
programmed by Adam McLean
This is a beta or developers copy of a Visual Basic program which has been desig
ned to assist people in translating from Latin into English. There will be a num
ber of bugs in the program, and I would welcome your assistance in sorting these
out. Please report any problems to Adam McLean <alchemy@dial.pipex.com>.
INSTALLATION
This program must be installed properly in order for the exe file to find the di
ctionaries. The file 'latin.exe' can be placed in any directory you choose but m
ust contain the proper dictionary files in the 'verbs' and 'nouns' and 'adject'
sub-directories of this directory. The 'qpro200.dll' and the 'csdialog.vbx', 'la
tin.ini' should also be in the directory alongside 'latin.exe', and the 'vbrun20
0.dll' should be placed in your 'windows' directory. If files are not where the
program expects to find them then this program will crash. This is an early deve
lopment copy and I have not had time to sort out all the error trapping one expe
cts of a professionally crafted program.
VOCABULARIES
This program has a limited vocabulary, but you can add up to 100 words to the di
ctionaries. I would welcome any assistance in building Latin word lists. This pr
ogram parses each word by going sequentially through the series of dictionaries,
searching for the stems and endings till it finds a match, thus nouns and adjec
tives must be entered under their proper declension and verbs under their conjug
ation. If these are placed in the wrong dictionaries then problems will result.
A large number of irregular and deponent verbs, and an almost full set of pronou
ns have already been entered into the dictionaries.
This version 0.95 now allows the interactive editing of the dictionaries - addin
g, editing and deleting words.

ENTERING NEW WORDS

When you enter a word into a directory you must only enter the stem. Thus for th
e first declension noun 'anima' enter 'anim'. There are many variations for nom
inative singulars and stems of third declension nouns and adjectives, and as I c
ould not work out a consistent algorithm for this, I have opted to have a separa
te dictionary for those third declension nouns and adjectives which differ in th
eir nominatative singular and stem. Thus, for example, 'rex' goes into the 3rd d
eclension nominatives and the stem 'reg' goes into the third declension nouns.
As to verbs, the first conjugation are regular, but with the remaining conjugati
ons the perfect and supine stems are not consistently derivable from the present
stem, so with all these verbs the perfect and supine stems must be separately e
ntered into their special dictionary. It is a bit of a nuisance having to enter
the parts of these verbs three times, but it does produce consistent results in
the translation. For example, with 'exsurgo, exsurgere, exsurrexi, exsurrectum',
you must put 'exsurg' in the third conjugation verb dictionary, 'exsurrex' in t
he verb perfect, and 'exsurrect' in the verb supine dictionary.
LOWER CASE
At the moment this program converts all text to lower case, in order to speed up
the search algorithm. Consequently all the words you enter into the dictionary
should be in lower case, otherwise they will not be recognised.
ENTERING TEXT
Text can either be entered immediately into the Latin text window (in lowercase)
or alternatively you can opt to load a .lat text file. This is automatically pa
rsed into sentences, and these appear in turn in the Latin text window, once you
have translated these, you can load the next sentence. The sentence parser work
s by looking for '.' periods or full stops. Punctuation marks ',' ':' etc are st
ripped off the ends of the words and ignored by the program. If you load in text
from a .lat file the 'vocabulary' button will appear - this will scan the file
and build a list of words in your file that are not in the dictionaries. This ca
n speed up your translating of the text by allowing you to enter the new words b
efore proceeding with the translation.
AMBIGUOUS WORDS
In Latin there are some situations where the same sequence of letters may actual
ly be parts of different Latin words. An example would be 'solis'. If you are un
sure if the program has parsed the word correctly, choose it in the Latin text w
indow by double clicking then hitting the control <alt> button will bring up a w
indow in which all the parsings of the selected word will be shown.

PRINTING OUT TRANSLATIONS

You can print out the translation of the current sentence, or if you are working
on a file, choose to print out the translations for the entire file. Note, file
s are at present limited to 4000 characters. If you have larger texts, you must
divide them into .txt files smaller than 4k.
PLEASE HELP
Please help me develop this program further with suggestions, or by identifying
bugs, in the program or the parsing of words. I would also be very pleased to ha
ve some help in building dictionaries of words, broken down into declensions and
conjugations.