L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #135 Translation of embedded text

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: How do I turn off the translation monster? - Logos Forums

I was reading Ott, Ludwig. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Company, 1957. (Yes, I know there are issues with the translation and I know it is no longer available from Verbum.com.) This is a prime example of where I would love to use the Translation feature to translate specific portions of the text. Yes, I know that Ott provides a translation so it is not strictly necessary. For the Latin, it translates my highlighted text very well.

I knew that Greek was not among the supported langauge as the translator tool is designed for modern not ancient Greek.

What I did not realize is that if no text is highlighted and the translator side panel is left open, the Translator will translate from the top of the page. The red box contains the highlight indicating the text currently translated in the Translator side panel. The green box contains the untranslated Greek; the yellow, the untranslated Latin.

The reason for this is that the language tagging in our resources is not always sufficient for short strings (individual words and phrases). If we didn't attempt to translate the text, then we wouldn't correctly translate these.

This raises two issues:

1. The English to English translation does count towards our monthly limit
2. Short strings are not necessarily picked up for translation