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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR - Less Wrong
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Okay, I'll stop lurking and register, if it will help get a new HPMOR out. Here is my translation:
non est salvatori salvator
neque victori Dominus
nec pater nec mater
modo nihilitas supera
I do have confidence in my translation, which I suppose is a tiny amount of evidence in its favor. The sense is very well preserved, and it has a rhythm that flows well (admittedly subjective). I did not fit it to a classical Latin poetic form such as a hexameter or elegaic couplet; I could do this as well but I doubt I could do it while leaving the sense strictly unchanged.
(note for fellow Latinists: the construction in the first two lines is the dative of possession, which I think is very nice for this metaphorical (as opposed to physical possession) sense of "hath")
Thanks! Here for comparison is Google's translation:
If "Soter" or "Sotehr" means "savior", as I seem to recall from Aristoi, that might suit the meaning well; and if the first line makes sense grammatically, of which no clue hath I, it has a good ring. "Defensori" does sound closer to the intended meaning than "victori" or "vindex". And whether "modo nihil est" means at all the same thing as "modo nihilitas supera", I've likewise no clue but it sounds like the "above" part was left out. If it actually does convey the same meaning, it is more compact.
If this version works, it would have a powerful ring to it:
But one suspects that what's actually needed is:
Yes, soter is a good word for savior. Google has the grammar wrong (it doesn't seem like it's even trying to decline, all the nouns were left as nominative). If you want to keep the parallelism you had in the English ("No X hath the X") it would need to be
Non est soteri soter
or
Non habet sotera soter
If you use the second, I guarantee you will get mail from well-meaning fans saying "You did that wrong! You need an accusative there, and Sotera isn't accusative!". Oddly, it is, though I would never have guessed without looking it up...apparently it was borrowed from Greek and didn't ever regularize; it kept on being declined as though it were Greek. I like the version with "est" way better anyway, and lines two and three would also need to be slightly different grammatically if you switch to "habet"
I would be tempted to go with just "Nullus soter soteri", a more poetic construction that in English would be closer to "no saviour for the saviour", leaving verb 'est / there is' as implicit. This would also line up nicely with the following lines.
edit: also "salvator" seems a better match to the "rescuer" meaning of "saviour" than "soter".
I vote for salvator, though I am not an expert in Mediaeval Latin. In classical Latin, at least, the Greek would be tacky. Both words sound rather Christian, but soter even more so than salvator.
I think modo is an improvement over solum.
Nihilitas sounds much weaker than nihil: I'd prefer the latter. We shouldn't think English: the -ness part doesn't need to be carried over. Then again, it is possible that nihilitas was a favourite word of 13th-century literature.
ehm , man: Soter is ancient greek and it was used by medieval erudite scholar, yes, but to refer, in a more or less cryptic way, only to Jchrist.