Latin Translation Assistant

I know this isn’t going to be of much interest to most people, but I can’t tell you how excited I am someone did this. I found this gem over at In Rebus, and I can’t say enough good things about it.

This is a front-end interface for William Whitaker’s popular Latin-to-English Dictionary program, popularly known as WORDS. WORDS is, quite possibly, the best translation application for Latin< ->English out there right now. One of the reasons it’s so fantastic is it gives a grammatical analysis of the words, not just a definition.

It is not without its drawbacks, however. The interface (shown left) is rather clunky – it’s a DOS based program, and thus totally command-line driven. While this isn’t so much a problem for me (being a child of the command-line era), it can be a stumbling block for those attempting to use it for the first time. Also, due to limitations of the Windows command terminal (sigh) you can sometimes get strange wrapping and truncated information without realizing there is more to see on the “next page.”

The Translation Assistant (shown right) helps out by giving us a windows layer to the application. Keep in mind, this is simply an extension of the WORDS program; you still need to first have WORDS installed for this to work. This makes using WORDS so much easier! Switching between translation modes is clear, and simple to do, as is switching between showing definition, and full morphology.

A word of warning though – The output itself is potentially meaningless to someone who dosn’t have a basic understanding of Latin grammar. This isn’t intended for lay people wanting to know what their club’s fancy-sounding motto really means.

All in all, this is a great extension of an already fantastic application, and one that was a long time coming. If you have been using William Whitaker’s WORDS, you will love this addition to it!

You can find it, along with full description and instructions, by following this link …  Since it’s a single executable that only need to be dropped into your existing WORDS directory, I’m offering this mirror of the download as well.