Latin parser and translator 0.95 programmed by Adam McLean This is a beta or developers copy of a Visual Basic program which has been designed to assist people in translating from Latin into English. There will be a number of bugs in the program, and I would welcome your assistance in sorting these out. Please report any problems to Adam McLean . INSTALLATION This program must be installed properly in order for the exe file to find the dictionaries. The file 'latin.exe' can be placed in any directory you choose but must contain the proper dictionary files in the 'verbs' and 'nouns' and 'adject' sub-directories of this directory. The 'qpro200.dll' and the 'csdialog.vbx', 'latin.ini' should also be in the directory alongside 'latin.exe', and the 'vbrun200.dll' should be placed in your 'windows' directory. If files are not where the program expects to find them then this program will crash. This is an early development copy and I have not had time to sort out all the error trapping one expects of a professionally crafted program. VOCABULARIES This program has a limited vocabulary, but you can add up to 100 words to the dictionaries. I would welcome any assistance in building Latin word lists. This program parses each word by going sequentially through the series of dictionaries, searching for the stems and endings till it finds a match, thus nouns and adjectives must be entered under their proper declension and verbs under their conjugation. If these are placed in the wrong dictionaries then problems will result. A large number of irregular and deponent verbs, and an almost full set of pronouns have already been entered into the dictionaries. This version 0.95 now allows the interactive editing of the dictionaries - adding, editing and deleting words. ENTERING NEW WORDS When you enter a word into a directory you must only enter the stem. Thus for the first declension noun 'anima' enter 'anim'. There are many variations for nominative singulars and stems of third declension nouns and adjectives, and as I could not work out a consistent algorithm for this, I have opted to have a separate dictionary for those third declension nouns and adjectives which differ in their nominatative singular and stem. Thus, for example, 'rex' goes into the 3rd declension nominatives and the stem 'reg' goes into the third declension nouns. As to verbs, the first conjugation are regular, but with the remaining conjugations the perfect and supine stems are not consistently derivable from the present stem, so with all these verbs the perfect and supine stems must be separately entered into their special dictionary. It is a bit of a nuisance having to enter the parts of these verbs three times, but it does produce consistent results in the translation. For example, with 'exsurgo, exsurgere, exsurrexi, exsurrectum', you must put 'exsurg' in the third conjugation verb dictionary, 'exsurrex' in the verb perfect, and 'exsurrect' in the verb supine dictionary. LOWER CASE At the moment this program converts all text to lower case, in order to speed up the search algorithm. Consequently all the words you enter into the dictionary should be in lower case, otherwise they will not be recognised. ENTERING TEXT Text can either be entered immediately into the Latin text window (in lowercase) or alternatively you can opt to load a .lat text file. This is automatically parsed into sentences, and these appear in turn in the Latin text window, once you have translated these, you can load the next sentence. The sentence parser works by looking for '.' periods or full stops. Punctuation marks ',' ':' etc are stripped off the ends of the words and ignored by the program. If you load in text from a .lat file the 'vocabulary' button will appear - this will scan the file and build a list of words in your file that are not in the dictionaries. This can speed up your translating of the text by allowing you to enter the new words before proceeding with the translation. AMBIGUOUS WORDS In Latin there are some situations where the same sequence of letters may actually be parts of different Latin words. An example would be 'solis'. If you are unsure if the program has parsed the word correctly, choose it in the Latin text window by double clicking then hitting the control button will bring up a window in which all the parsings of the selected word will be shown. PRINTING OUT TRANSLATIONS You can print out the translation of the current sentence, or if you are working on a file, choose to print out the translations for the entire file. Note, files are at present limited to 4000 characters. If you have larger texts, you must divide them into .txt files smaller than 4k. PLEASE HELP Please help me develop this program further with suggestions, or by identifying bugs, in the program or the parsing of words. I would also be very pleased to have some help in building dictionaries of words, broken down into declensions and conjugations.