Stunningly fast automatic translator for Latin, written in C++/Assembly. Translate words, sentences, paragraphs and complete Latin files into English - in seconds. Latin translation at your fingertips!

Superior translation quality. The LSP designation of the new Blitz Latin 2.0 series designates the addition of currently 16,800 Latin Standard Phrases to improve translation accuracy. Many of these LSPs will have their inflections or verb endings assigned automatically during use, greatly increasing their utility. The 1.6/1.7/1.8/2.0/2.1/2.2/2.3 series have English subject-verb-object-else (SVOE) word-ordering. All versions have a limited inbuilt neural network facility.

Enormous Latin dictionary - 73,549 words, including large medieval, Catholic/Vatican and modern sub-dictionaries (79,206 words with optional Botany add-on). These are words as they would be counted in a paper dictionary, i.e. not counting the very many inflected variants of nearly every word. (4.768 million words if inflections are counted individually.) To provide context, the huge Oxford Latin Dictionary (classical Latin only) has around 34,000 words excluding proper names.

Strong support for those reading medieval or neoLatin texts. The user can select options to translate preferentially with medieval (or neoLatin) adaptions of existing English meanings. For example the verb existo: classical meaning is ‘emerge/appear/arise/become’, medieval meaning is commonly ‘exist’. Or the verb consisto: classical meaning ‘stand/rest/take a position’, neoLatin meaning is ‘consist’. In addition the electronic dictionary contains more than 14,100 medieval Latin inventions and more than 10,450 modern Latin inventions, such as Latin words for the motor-car (automobilis) and the helicopter (helicopterum).

Experienced Latin users have instant access in a moveable dialog box to the fully parsed grammatical structure of any Latin word single-clicked on screen.

Easy on-screen editing - look up Latin words and modify the translation.

Storage/printing of Latin translation files.

Very robust in use.

Detailed manual supplied in PDF form (can be read/printed by free Adobe Acrobat Reader™).

Full search facility for Latin stems in Latin texts.

Existing users - click on 'Help/What's New?' in program menu to discover changes to this latest update.

Tested on over 1,000 Latin HTML files (after conversion to TXT files) provided at "http://www.theLatinLibrary.com". These files include such well-known authors as St. Augustine, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Suetonius, Tacitus, Vergil and many, many more, representing almost the entire domain of classical Latin (5.9 million words). 2.3 million further words from other classical Latin sources have been examined: 1.7 million legal words from Justinian's Digest/Codex and from Theodosius' Codex, and 600,000 words from the Vulgate Latin bible, and all the most common words incorporated. 7.8 million words from medieval documents have been translated and all the most common words incorporated. A quarter million words from medieval and modern Catholic/Vatican documents have been processed, and the most common ecclesiastical Latin words added. One million words from 18th-19th century mathematical texts in Latin (courtesy of Ian Bruce, Australia) have been scanned. 0.4 million modern (neo-)Latin words have been examined. And finally 11.5 million words from the Vatican's Acta Apostolicae Sedis files (AD 1909-2002, after bulk removal of non-Latin content) have been tested.

Blitz Latin has also been tested on PHI CD-ROM #5.3, courtesy of Packard Humanities Institute USA. The CD-ROM contains all Latin texts to 200AD, as well as several later Latin texts, total 7.5 million words. Again, all the most common words have been incorporated into Blitz Latin.

In total, Blitz Latin has been successfully run through Latin files amounting to well over 40 million words. All of these files together are translated collectively in fewer than 8 minutes with a four-year-old 1.8GHz PC. Blitz Latin will translate any Latin word (excepting proper names and mis-spellings) that occurs more than four times in these files. Most less-frequent words will also be translated.

Because Google Latin is a jigsaw translator (also called a statistical translator). Briefly, a jigsaw translator takes existing professional translations of Latin texts and chops them into small pieces. These pieces are matched with pieces taken from your Latin text. So you are translating your Latin text with pieces of someone else’s loose translation of a different text. A jigsaw translator is inappropriate for a language that is heavily inflected, since the translator has no knowledge of Latin grammar or Latin inflections, and its vocabulary depends entirely on what was present in the translated texts it turned into jigsaw pieces. Great if you want to translate Vergil, for which all the pieces will be available and idiosyncratically accurate (but then, why not buy the original professional translation?), much less accurate for something less well known. Such as most medieval texts.
For a full account of the differences between a rule-based translator like Blitz Latin and a jigsaw translator, and the appropriate uses for each, see our article here: Latin_Standard_Phrases_Article.pdf

Anyone who wants translation of Latin text for which no expert English translation is available. For example, translation of little-known Latin authors, Latin fragments and Latin inscriptions (at www.manfredclauss.de).

Anyone who wishes to translate medieval or legal Latin documents. Blitz Latin has a substantial vocabulary of common medieval and legal Latin words; also a large sub-dictionary for translation of medieval Latin music files. Blitz Latin also employs phonetic word checking for badly (mis) spelled medieval Latin words. A substantial additional 4,000-word medieval dictionary containing all the most common medieval Latin inventions is also supplied.

Anyone who wants to read modern Latin texts. More Latin has been written in the last 50 years than in all previous history. Blitz Latin now incorporates the "Calepinus Novus" dictionary (courtesy of Guy Licoppe, Melissa Foundation, Belgium) for modern words, such as the Latin for car and aeroplane.

Anyone who wishes to read Vatican/Catholic/ecclesiastical Latin. Blitz Latin contains over 3,000 stems dedicated to this purpose.

Anyone who wishes to discover the meaning of rare or irregular Latin words. Irregular stems can be hard to locate in a conventional Latin dictionary.

Anyone who wishes to translate Latin text computer-scanned from a Latin text book. Blitz Latin is very robust when confronted with typical scanning errors.

Anyone who wishes to translate the Latin text files available at "http://www.theLatinLibrary.com" or at "https://www.tha.de/~harsch/a_chron.html".

Full search facility for Latin stems. Researchers with a large collection of Latin files (eg down-loaded from the Latin Library/Augsburg) can investigate every occurrence of a key word or the global usage of individual Latin stems, with printed local context and user-selected information about how the stem is used.

Spell-checking of Latin files - on-screen.

Latin Teachers. - See "As a Teaching Aid".

Original electronic Latin Dictionary by Dr. William Whitaker (U.S.A.) - specialist in Latin grammar. Dr Whitaker died on December 14, 2010. Obituary.
Programming by Dr. John White (U.K.) - specialist in Artificial Intelligence.

Blitz Latin _XP series: Microsoft WINDOWS XP, VISTA (32/64-bit), WINDOWS-7 (32/64-bit), and WINDOWS-8 and -10 (64-bit).
Will Blitz Latin function with an Apple Mac computer? Some users tell us that Blitz Latin will operate with an Apple Mac, provided that the WINE emulator https://www.Winehq.org for Microsoft Windows has been installed. We lack such experience, and can provide no guarantees, nor technical help.

No bugs reported for the 1.4+, 1.5+, 1.6+, 1.7+, 1.8+, 2.0+, 2.1+ and 2.2+ series of Blitz Latin. Programmer discovered bug in 1.66 when 3rd-person of certain verbs single-clicked on screen for meaning. 1.66 at once replaced at no cost with 1.66A.

Download Blitz Latin here: Blitz230PublicPackage.zip.

You must have WinZip (https://www.winzip.com, or other program that will open .zip files such as '7z') on your computer.

1. Create a folder on your C:\drive called 'BlitzLatin' (without the quotes). Thus you now have a new, empty folder called C:\BlitzLatin.

2. Copy the 'Blitz230PublicPackage.zip' to your new folder (C:\BlitzLatin).

3. Unzip Blitz230PublicPackage.zip in your new folder, by double-clicking on file 'Blitz230PublicPackage.zip'. This will give you all the files you need in this folder.

More detailed information can be found in file 'read_me_first.txt' (one A4 page), which can be found in the newly created folder named Documentation.

Very few users will require the botanical addition. If in doubt, you don't need it:

You will also need WinZip (or similar) on your computer to open the file. Full instructions are provided with the file BlitzLatinBotany.pdf.

IMPORTANT - the botany package overrides all other types of Latin translation by Blitz Latin. It does NOT contain the Latin names for plants such as 'daffodil'; it is intended to read Latin texts of botany and covers both the northern and southern hemispheres of the world. Do NOT use the botany file unless you have a strong interest in botanical research. Even then, you must create TWO folders for Blitz Latin: i) One for your regular package (name it eg 'BlitzLatin'); ii) One for the botanical package (name it for example 'BotanicalBlitzLatin'). You must install ordinary 'Blitz Latin' first into your new folder 'BotanicalBlitzLatin, and then unzip the contents of file blitzLatinBotany.zip into the same folder.

Download our Acrobat pdf file here: (LatinAmbiguity.pdf) [Right-click on the link, then select 'Save target as...'].

For Latin Standard Phrases, right-click here: (Latin_Standard_Phrases_Article.pdf)

Academic article: John F. White (2016). Blitz Latin Revisited. Journal of Classics Teaching, 16, pp 43-49 doi:10.1017/S2058631015000203. Published online: 18 January 2016. Paper edition October 2016, pp 43-49.

Download Acrobat Reader:

Download free Adobe Acrobat Reader (required to read/print the Blitz Latin manual) from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html.

Registration is no longer required for Blitz Latin. The program is free to use. However, I acknowledge gladly the huge support given to Blitz Latin (and to this author) by Software Partners for around 20 years. Sadly, the two owners of Software-Partners have retired from business.

Contact the program author (John White) with feedback at the e-mail address given in the Blitz Latin manual.

Check this site to see if upgrades are available. Generally speaking, upgrades will be released every six months (nominally April and October).

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