Google Translate is notoriously bad at translating even when it comes to living languages. You can find plenty of memes and articles online about its comical ineptitude at translating from, say, English to German or Spanish to English. Believe it or not, though, Google Translate is even worse at translating when it comes to dead languages. Google Translate is completely, utterly, thoroughly inept when it comes to translating things written in Latin and Ancient Greek.
Latin
To prove this, here is a little experiment I devised. I dug out my old Latin workbook (Workbook for Wheelock’s Latin: Third Edition, Revised by Paul T. Comeau and Richard A. LaFleur) and turned to the very first exercise involving the translation of full sentences.
These are all extremely easy sentences to translate—what you might call “baby Latin.” Anyone who knows any Latin whatsoever could translate any one of these sentences easily. In fact, even if you know no Latin at all, you could probably guess at the meaning of one of these sentences based on English cognates and not be far off. Therefore, as an experiment, I took these very, very simple, easy sentences and entered them into Google Translate to see what I would get.
Google Translate got every single one of them wrong—and most of them egregiously so! Not only that, but it got many of them wrong in ways no human being ever would. In many cases, it just left out half the sentence for no apparent reason! Here are the sentences I used for my experiment:
Sentence #1
Latin: “O vir magne, populum Romanum serva!”
My translation: “Oh great man, protect the Roman people!”
Google Translate’s translation: “Oh, a great Roman people!”
Sentence #2
Latin: “Si nihil me satiat, saepe erro.”
My translation: “If nothing satisfies me, I often err.”
Google Translate’s translation: “If nothing satisfies me, often mistaken.”
Sentence #3
Latin: “Nautae filiabus meis nihil dant.”
My translation: “Sailors give nothing to my daughters.”
Google Translate’s translation: “The sailors have no daughters give.”
Sentence #4
Latin: “Agricolas in agro video.”
My translation: “I see the farmers in the field.”
Google Translate’s translation: “The farmer in the field.”
Sentence #5
Latin: “Amicum filii mei hodie vides.”
My translation: “You watch my son’s friend today.”
Google Translate’s translation: “Today the friend of my son.”
Sentence #6
Latin: “Puellae et pueri formam rosarum amant.”
My translation: “Girls and boys love the beauty of roses.”
Google Translate’s translation: “The girls and boys love the form of roses.”*
*Google Translate technically got this one sort of correct, but the translation is unidiomatic; although the Latin word forma can mean “form,” in this case, it clearly means “beauty,” which is another possible meaning of the word.
Sentence #7
Latin: “Non debes filias et filios tuos terrere.”
My translation: “You should not frighten your daughters and sons.”
Google Translate’s translation: “Children are not expected to frighten your children.”
Conclusion
Google Translate cannot translate Latin. It cannot even pretend to be able to translate Latin. Google Translate’s Latin is utterly hopeless. Now let us see how awful Google Translate is at Ancient Greek…
Ancient Greek
As it turns out, Google Translate’s struggles with Latin are only the beginning when it comes to its struggles with Ancient Greek. You see, Google Translate does not actually have an Ancient Greek setting, but it does have a setting for Modern Greek and you can enter text written in Ancient Greek into its Modern Greek setting and see what comes out. I decided to do this just for the fun of it.
Once again, I dug out my introductory Ancient Greek textbook (Learn to Read Greek: Workbook, Part 1 by Andrew Keller and Stephanie Russell) and took sentences from the very first lesson that involved the translation of full sentences. Once again, these are extremely simple, basic sentences that anyone who knows any Ancient Greek whatsoever would be able to translate. The results were even more hilariously bad than the ones I got from Latin. Here are my results:
Sentence #1
Ancient Greek: “οἱ θεοὶ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους πολέμου παύουσιν.”
My translation: “The gods are stopping the humans from war.”
Google Translate’s translation: “The god of human pauses of war.”
Sentence #2
Ancient Greek: “οἱ ἄνθρωποι, ὦ ξένε, πρὸς τῶν θεῶν πολέμου παύονται.”
My translation: “The people, oh foreigner, are ceasing from war on behalf of the gods.”
Google Translate’s translation: “People, they say, stop fighting before the war.”
Sentence #3
Ancient Greek: “πότε, ὦ πολῖται, τοῖς ἀδίκοις πείθεσθαι οὐκ ἐθελήσετε;”
My translation: “When, oh citizens, will you not be willing to be persuaded by the unjust men?”
Google Translate’s translation: “when, polytheist, do the judges convince you of that?”
Sentence #4
Ancient Greek: “πότε τὰς τοῦ πολέμου αἰτίας οὗτοι λέξουσιν ἐν τῇ βουλῇ;”
My translation: “When will these men say the causes of the war in the council?”
Google Translate’s translation: “when of war because of what they say in parliament?”
Sentence #5
Ancient Greek: “πολλάκις ἔλεγον οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ περὶ τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ δήμου καὶ περὶ τοῦ κοινοῦ ἀγαθοῦ.”
My translation: “Often the Athenians were speaking both about the rule of the people and about the common good.”
Google Translate’s translation: “Many times the Athenians say about the municipality and about the common good.”
Conclusion
Google Translate’s setting for Modern Greek cannot handle Ancient Greek. (And, frankly, I doubt it can handle Modern Greek either.) Google Translate is so hopelessly pathetic at Ancient Greek that, if you want a sentence translated from Ancient Greek into English, you would probably be better served if you gave the sentence to someone who cannot even read the Greek alphabet, told them the meaning of one word from the sentence, and then just told them to make the rest of the sentence up based on that one word.
The moral of this story is that you should never try to use Google Translate to do any kind of translation involving any dead languages because whatever Google Translate gives you is almost 100% guaranteed to be hopelessly wrong. On the positive side, though, at least I know that classicists will not be replaced by computer translators anytime in the relatively near future.
Part of the fun with exercises like this is to try to figure out *why* the translation bot came up with that translation. For instance, for some reason it just can’t see “video” in any form, and apparently it assumed that “et” in Latin sentence #7 connected clauses – perhaps it’s programmed to assume that if it sees a verb on each side? I have no Greek at all, though, so I’ve no idea what it is about the Greek for “citizens” that makes Google think of “polytheists” (although presumably most of them were). Any ideas?
I have found that Google Translate works reasonably well as a dictionary, though; that is, if you give it one word it will usually give you a correct English equivalent. I agree, though, that it is hopeless at translating sentences.
Yes, Google Translate is reasonably useful when it comes to translating single words, but it still often makes mistakes and it is always best to double check what it gives you. For instance, I read an answer on Quora written by a Greek person in which he showed a picture of a man with a tattoo that said “δωρεάν” in fancy script. Evidently, the man in the picture had typed the word “free” into Google Translate and it gave him the word “δωρεάν” as the Greek translation. The problem is that δωρεάν means “free” as in “without cost”; whereas the man with the tattoo was quite evidently looking for the word meaning “free” as in “free from tyranny,” which is “ελεύθερος.”
The Ancient Greek word for “citizens” is πολῖται, which can only mean “citizens” and can never mean “polytheist.” Even in Modern Greek, the word πολίτες, which is derived from πολῖται, still only means “citizens” or “civilians” and can never mean anything remotely like “polytheist” as far as I am aware. The only explanation I can think of for why Google Translate translated this word as “polytheist” is because πολῖται is spelled vaguely similar to πολυθεϊστής, which is the Modern Greek word for “polytheist.” Even then, though, the words are pretty obviously different.
I reckon that the reason why Google Translate cannot seem to see the word video in any form is probably because video is a word in English. Therefore, the word always registers with the translation bot as an English word, even though it is also a word in Latin.
I believe Google now translates by recognizing whole phrases that have been translated previously. So I suspect if you had some Latin written by a Roman, you might get a good translation. For example, Google Translate had no problem with “Arma virumque cano”, which it translated as “I sing of arms and a man.”
One reason Google translate often gets ancient languages wrong is that most of the Latin and Greek in its database is early Christian writings, and the early Christians changed the meanings of a great number of words, because they developed their own specialized jargon, sometimes based on particular scripture verses or passages in Plato. For instance, in his allegory of the cave, Plato used περιστροφή to mean “to turn around and face the Good”, and Christians began to use it to mean “becoming a Christian”, as a dog-whistle to Platonists to signify the Platonic nature of Christianity. So now Google translates “convertere” as “change”, and has lost the dominant meaning of “to turn around”.
This phenomenon provides us with interesting evidence for Whorf’s hypothesis. For instance, “αιρεισθαι” (to choose between) became “to commit heresy”, so that it became harder in Christian Greek to think of “free choice” as something good. “Faith” originally meant “trust based on evidential proof”, but as St. Paul, following Plato, considered the belief in one’s own divine inspiration to be evidential proof, and actual empirical proof to be worthless, the word’s meaning had to change to “trust based on nothing” in order to avoid making Paul seem stupid; and so Western civilization picked up the strange belief that believing things without evidence was more-virtuous than believing them with evidence.
Greek words used in the New Testament became synonyms of the Latin word which St. Jerome chose for them in his Vulgate Bible, as any other usage of them might make one a heretic. (This is why the Roman Catholic church considers the Vulgate more authoritative and reliable than the original Greek.) You’ll run into a similar problem trying to translate any African or Native American language, or any language from a place that had no written language until Christian missionaries arrived. For instance, the concept of “perfect” didn’t exist outside of Sanskrit and the writings of Plato before Christianity popularized it. You can find a word for “perfect” in any dictionary for any African language, but all of these words originally meant some particular meaning of ancient Greek “telos”, or some similar concept, and were adapted by missionary Bible translators to mean Plato’s concept “perfect” (another bizarre concept which now seems natural to Westerners). For many African languages, about 90% of Google’s database is the Bible, so translations done by it could Christianize the meaning.
interesting. so where do you go to tranzlate elenik ancient?
google tranzlates περιστροφή az rotation. I dont see it in biblehub.
‘peri’ iz ‘around’ i rekal vaguely, google says ‘about’ and ‘strofi’ ‘turn’; so abouturn or arounturn.
I found ‘onturn epistrepsōsin ἐπιστρέψωσιν’ https://biblehub.com/interlinear/mark/4-12.htm
I find it helps me if i think spacialy for tranzlacion.
so doez ‘τέλειοι teleioi’ mean ‘komplete’ az biblehub sayz? https://biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/5-48.htm
Er, I should have said “MUCH of the Latin and Greek in its database is Christian writings”, not “MOST of the Latin and Greek in its database is EARLY Christian writings”. My impression is that most of its Latin samples are from Christian-era writings, but probably not mostly early; and I have no way of knowing whether “most” is accurate.
Out of curiousity. At what point is English considered a dead language? Chaucer?
(Chauncer “English”)
* Heere bigynneth the Knyghtes Tale
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
5 That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
10 And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
15 Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde,
And al his hoost, in armes hym bisyde.
I’m assuming middle English is considered a dead language like ancient Greek given it oddly seems to have less in common with modern English than modern Greek does from 2200 years ago. So what happens in 500 years when English language has evolved again. Do we call “English” a dead language and have “new English”. And “new new English” after that? Some other name other than “English”?
IMO the current language taxonomy really doesn’t make long term sense.. These cut off points and naming schemes seem a bit arbitrary and artificial given the ongoing analogue evolution of a language..