How to translate Ancient Greek.
The main reason to learn Ancient Greek, is to be able to translate Ancient Greek
texts into English.
Before we start, keep in mind what’s the objective here: you want to translate
a text into modern English. The resulting translation should sound like
it was written in English in the first place: it has to be fluent and
enjoyable, not in some “bad-old-looking-odd-sounding” version of modern English.
For this reason it is extremely important learn how to translate an
original Ancient Greek text or book in an efficient and effective way.
There is an almost scientific method for that: you just have to follow these
Step #0: What you need to know.
Before talking about the translation process itself, we should point out the
notions that are necessary to translate properly:
- Knowledge of prepositions and conjunctions, especially
you should be extremely comfortable with the most common prepositions, their
meaning and the cases that may follow them (ie. περì, πρός, εἰς, ἐάν, ὅτι,
παρὰ, ὑπὸ, etc.).
- Knowledge of pronouns and their meaning. Just like
prepositions and conjunctions, pronouns are found in great quantities, so
knowing what they mean will allow you not to waste time looking them up
on the dictionary.
- Knowledge of all cases' base functions: nominative
is a subject, accusative is an object or a destination, the genitive
indicates possession or origin, the dative is the indirect object or
indicates a way, manner or cause.
- Knowledge of common syntactic structures: you should
be able to easily recognise structures with infinitives and participles
such as the absolute genitive.
- Knowledge of words' roots: it's much easier to learn
roots rather than single words since from one root usually derive several
nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. Of course it's not always easy to
identify the root from a word: for that you should have a basic knowledge
of recurring phonetic phenomena.
- Knowledge of suffixes and prefixes: Ancient Greek
builds lots of words from a root and one or more prefixes and suffixes;
so knowing what they mean will allow you to understand at least a basic
meaning of many words.
Let's give an example, the word δυστυχής. It's build from three elements:
the negative prefix δυσ- (which is the equivalent of the English “dis-”,
“a-” or “un-” from “disloyal”, “amoral” and “unfaithful”), the τυχ- root
of τύχη (“luck/destiny”) and the -ης ending of adjectives. It's exactly
“un-luck-y” and that's what δυσ-τυχ-ής actually means!
Of course, you may find all these pieces of information inside Ancient Greek
Reference in the App Store!
Step #1: reading the Greek text.
- First of all, don't jump immediately on the dictionary! No
dictionary at the beginning!
- If there's any, read the title of the text to contextualize
it and try to remember anything you know on the subject (it's usually a legend,
some historical event, philosophy, etc...). If you haven't got any title see if
inside the text there are some names of historical or mythical figures and places
that you know about. This passage will save you from doing huge mistakes while
- Finally, you can now read the text a couple of times
to identify major sentences and concepts
Step #2: preliminary draft translation.
- Try to separate each sentence and clause and highlight
syntactical structures so that you can translate each part as a
single “entity” (you might make some mistakes: never assume you've got it
- Then translate what you know and understand without
using the dictionary and write a first draft using the
most generic meaning possible for every word and without worrying if it
sounds awful English-wise.
Step #3: dictionary draft translation.
Your first draft is probably written in horrible English and has an overall
vague meaning but should have a correct syntactical and grammatical structure.
It's time to fix these issues by using the dictionary this time.
- You should now write a second draft: look up the words you don't know
or you're uncertain about and choose more specific and appropriate
meanings for each term while keeping an eye on the context of the
- When you're done, put down the dictionary and read your second draft;
look for incongruences and correct them.
Step #4: final version.
Your second draft should be written in a sort-of-ok English but it
may still be a little too simple or too archaic-sounding: maybe your
sentences are extremely long or you've used strange expressions and
words that you will never find in an English book published a couple
of years ago... time to write the final version!
So, just rewrite your second draft as if you were writing an essay
and not a translation: using a modern, fluent and proper language.