TRANSLATION OF MEDIEVAL AND NEOLATIN TEXTS.
The majority of customers of Blitz Latin use the program for translation of medieval or neo-Latin texts.

Therefore we provide the following guidance for such customers:

1. Decide the AGE of your original Latin text.
Blitz Latin uses these definitions:
CLASSICAL age is from the foundation of Rome to about 600 AD.
MEDIEVAL age is from about 600 AD to about 1500 AD.
NEOLATIN age is from about 1500 AD to the present date.
Select your preference in menu item EDIT/AGE PREFERRED. You may need to adjust your setting in the light of experience. AGE is a filter, but is not very accurate. You will not see Latin words listed if they first occurred (according to the electronic dictionary!) after the age that you have chosen.

2. Decide the AREA PREFERRED of your original Latin text.
The list of options can be seen in menu item EDIT/AREA PREFERRED.
Most users will find that GENERAL suffices, other very popular areas include ECCLESIASTICAL and SCIENTIFIC/TECHNICAL (which also includes MATHEMATICS). You can also select PREFER MEDIEVAL MEANINGS or PREFER NEOLATIN MEANINGS. Since you can only select one preferred area, it is not possible to select both ‘Prefer Medieval Meanings’ AND ‘Ecclesiastical’. However, If you select (for example) AGE as Medieval and AREA as Ecclesiastical, Blitz Latin will filter its vocabulary for Latin words to include words of medieval age (as well as classic Latin words) and then will prefer Latin words of the AREA you have selected. If the program cannot find any suitable words, it will try again (without user intervention) to find words that are marked with medieval alternative meanings.

3. Decide your word order (Menu item EDIT/BEST ORDER).
For medieval and neoLatin texts, the best word-ordering is generally that of ‘VERB AFTER NOM’, since the word order of medieval and neoLatin texts is very similar to that of modern English. Classical Latin has the words of a sentence placed in order of their emphasis, while poets can place their words anywhere to fit their metre. But don’t be afraid to experiment in order to discover which suits YOUR Latin text best.

4. Save your Personal Settings.
You can save the settings that you have newly set for AGE, AREA and BEST ORDER (Menu item VIEW/Save User Settings.) This will also save any other preference that you might have set. Before you do this, you should un-tick (deselect) the irritating menu item EDIT/SINGLE WORD IN SENTENCE which provides this warning every time that you try to translate a single Latin word in a sentence: ‘Cannot safely sentence-translate one word!’ The warning is intended only for novice users of Blitz Latin.

5. Prepare your text.
Blitz Latin assumes that all words beginning with a capital letter are proper names (eg names of persons, cities, countries, rivers), excepting the first word of a sentence. Medieval writers had an infuriating habit of throwing in capital letters seemingly at random into Latin words. This is very confusing for Blitz Latin, even though it has a vocabulary of very many proper names, and also of Latin words that occur frequently with a leading capital letter, such as Et and De. Therefore the first thing to do is to remove any leading capital letters from words in your text that are not intended to be proper names - equally, make sure that words intended to be proper names do have a leading capital letter. Thus a sentence such as ‘Quatenus Odrysios iam pax Romana triones Temperat et tetricae conticuere tubae, Hunc Marcellino poteris, Faustine, libellum Mittere:’ (Medieval copy of a line of the poet Martial’s work) should be changed to ‘[q]uatenus Odrysios iam pax Romana triones [t]emperat et tetricae conticuere tubae, [h]unc Marcellino poteris, Faustine, libellum [m]ittere:’ (The square brackets ‘[]’ denote only the letters to be changed, do not place square brackets in your own text.)

Of course, all the above presumes that the user has a sufficient knowledge of Latin to make these changes. If you lack such knowledge, then change ALL the words to lower case as a preliminary fix, then check to see if words that are not translated can be translated with the first letter restored to upper-case.

Convert title words, such as CICERO IN CATILINAM to predominantly lower case: ‘Cicero in Catilinam.’ Be sure to add a full-stop/period after the title, as shown.
Spaced titles, eg ‘B I B L I O T H E C A’, are not recognised, and must be condensed to ‘BIBLIOTHECA’.
Roman numerals must be all capitalised, eg VII (not vii).

Many of our users tell us that they take single paragraphs of Latin text from their original Latin document, and translate these single paragraphs, cutting-and-pasting the translation after human polishing of Blitz Latin’s translation back into their original text. This is a very good idea, and we recommend it. It will also make much easier the task of preparing your text, one paragraph at a time.

6. Only now, load your Latin file, or cut-and-paste Latin paragraphs, into Blitz Latin and press the large TRANSLATE button. Almost certainly, you will need to make some editing changes - Latin is a very ambiguous language and Blitz Latin lacks your general knowledge to resolve alternative possible translations.

