Rhapsodies

I love playing with Google Translate. It’s very useful though I only use it sparingly since I’m never completely sure just how on the mark it really is. One thing I like to do is to run popular quotes through it. I especially like to do this with it’s Latin translator, Roman history being one of my favorite areas of focus as well as having enjoyed Latin in high school. I have this idea for a long term project to do illuminated manuscripts with Pratchett and Gaiman dialogue.

Anyway for today I was trying something simple; Robert Heinlein‘s “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” TANSTAFAL Mostly to see what new acronym I could get… perhaps for a deliberately pretentious T-shirt or something. The interesting thing with translating I find is that it teaches you a whole lot about your own language. To be sure the translating software works properly you have to clean up the original material, remove contractions and make sure everything is as literal as possible. So after tweaking the original phrasing the best I got was “Tale Convivium Non Est Liber“ The biggest problem with it with this  was that “Liber”, meaning free, does not mean free meaning no payment necessary. I didn’t for the life of me know what the right word and when I looked for it the closest words really didn’t grasp the concept.

I read a great book on Roman Humor once that began by explaining how Cicero would not have understood the “We are all individuals” joke from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” By the same token I wonder if a Roman would have understood Heinlein’s point that nothing is truly free and even charity is conditional?