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Do you ever translate from Ancient languages (Latin, etc.)?
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Thread poster: Javier Herrera

Do you ever translate from Ancient languages (Latin, etc.)?

Giorgia Milani

France
Local time: 02:03
French to Italian
+ ...

:-)

Aug 23, 2009

Wow, I was so surprised to read all your comments! I studied Classics and therefore had been studied latin and ancient greek and did a lot of translations from those languages into italian but would have never thought that I could work with those languages and be paid for it in the translation market!

alz

Croatia
Local time: 02:03
English to Croatian
+ ...

belive it or not

Oct 23, 2009

Javier Herrera wrote:

I'm just wondering. Some people have Latin on their profiles. I can't imagine how they gets assignments with an ancient language. Javier

[Subject edited by staff or moderator 2004-06-26 21:26]

belive it or not, but recently I was asked to translate several manuscript documents from 17/18th century from latin into Croatian.

Further more, I had to hire a court interpreter/sworn translator Latin-Croatian, because the client needed/wanted this kind of service.

life is full of surprises

PRAKAASH

India
Local time: 06:33

Member (2007)
English to Hindi
+ ...

Sanskrit- another ancient language

Oct 23, 2009

What Latin is for you in USA or UK, 'Sanskrit' is for most of the Indian languages i.e. mother of all languages.
Sanskrit is not used too much in India yet there are scholars, learners and experts, who teach, study and work in Sanskrit. All ancient Hindu mythological books including four Vedas are written in this ancient languages.
Sanskrit is a language which can open new secrets of ancient science that are mentioned in Hindu mythological books and epics.

Do you know?

Ravana, the king of Lanka (now known as Srilanka) had a jet of his own named 'Pushpak', with which he could fly for miles within minutes/hrs!

Ayurveda, the Indian medicinal epic has remedies for several diseases. These remedies can cure the patients completely!

The ancient Hindu sages/great people had attained a power of meditation, wherein, they could see far away events as well without using live coverage of any television (what Sanjay did in Mahabharata for King Dhritarashtra).

A great weapon, which was as great as nuclear bomb today, was 'Brahma-astra'.
This weapon was owned only by few great warriors. This weapon was respected by all great warriors those days.
When Lord Hanuman was attacked with this weapon, he respected it as it was creature of the Lord of the lords Brahma.

There are lot other stuffs, which are far away from anyone's imagination, that one can't even believe these days that such great stuffs were there in those ancient times.

If anyone has studied Abhijnanshakuntalam, a great epic and story written by Great Poet Kalidas (as Shakespeare is to English, same is Kalidas to Sanskrit), they know the worth of this book and have lots of praises for this epic.

Sanskrit is a language full of curiousity for many people. I can bet that it is grammatically and scientifically, one of the best languages in the whole world.

I, do, respect Latin as well, however, I don't know anything about it except that it is mother language of English, which is used in India widely nowadays.

Take Care!
PRAKAASH

alz

Croatia
Local time: 02:03
English to Croatian
+ ...

ancient roots

Oct 23, 2009

PRAKAASH wrote:

What Latin is for you in USA or UK, 'Sanskrit' is for most of the Indian languages i.e. mother of all languages.

I, do, respect Latin as well, however, I don't know anything about it except that it is mother language of English, which is used in India widely nowadays.

Latin belongs to Indo-European group of languages, thus its ancinet roots are in Sanskrit too.
I am wondering if for you, alreday having good knowledge of Sanskrit, leraning Latin would be easier.

Rosa Grau
Spain
Local time: 02:03

Member (2011)
English to Catalan
+ ...

Sanskrit and Pāli

Nov 21, 2011

Hello,

I am into Sanskrit and Pāli, an indo-arian Prakrit very close to Sanskrit. I am currently reading texts from the Buddhist Theravāda tradition and translating them into Catalan. As a language combination it does not sell very well

but it is very interesting and I am certainly enjoying this work.

I would be very pleased to meet people who read and/or translate ancient Indian languages.

Rosa

Gennady Lapardin

Russian Federation
Local time: 05:03

Member (2006)
Italian to Russian
+ ...

Middle and Ancient Greek - interested

Nov 22, 2011

These are the only definitely dead ancient languages "killed" by the modern vernacular, unlike Latin and Sanskrit. Karl Krumbacher's 1200 pages review (in 1897) of the Byz. literature from 527 to 1453, gives an impression that there are tons and tons of unknown, only fiction science phylosophy theology, literature (without various correspondence reports, etc.). Something should have survived, after world wars and industrializations in between? There are "strange" difficulties in digitizing these manuscripts. No doubt, if they were publicly available in the digitized format, this market would have found its niche.

[Edited at 2011-11-22 09:05 GMT]

[Edited at 2011-11-22 15:09 GMT]

Phil Hand

China
Local time: 09:03

Member (2011)
Chinese to English

Classical Chinese still alive

Nov 22, 2011

Very tough to get work into English, because it's all done by academics, but there's quite a lot of translation being done into modern Chinese. I assume it's badly paid or again done by academics, but I don't know - there's a big market for "stories from Confucius" or similar, if they're well written enough to attract readers.
Plus you get a lot of quotes from classical - Classical Chinese was used as the lingua franca right up till 1900 (like Latin in Europe in the middle ages), so as soon as you stray into any historical material you're likely to come across some. Can't be a proper reader of Chinese without a smattering of Classical.