Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
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Color-coded translation

Words that 'agree' can be linked by color instead of position
 
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nunc et latentis proditor intumo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo
pignusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci
-Horace 1:9

Behold a master at work.

Sweet too the laugh, whose feign'd alarm
The hiding-place of beauty tells,
The token, ravish'd from the arm
Or finger, that but ill rebels.
-Conington's translation

That, my friends, is garbage, and any English speaker who pretends that Horace in English is still praiseworthy is self-important or lying like a rug.

Translators of poetic language have an impossible job, for one cannot simultaneously preserve the meter, consonance, construction, meaning etc. Hilariously enough, to make Latin poets sound 'good' in English, a rhyme scheme is often *added*.

One variable that Latin poets (I'll stick to what I know) employ is the position of words. Because sentence structure is astonishingly flexible in Latin poetry, the structure itself can be creatively employed, as it is in Carmina 1:9 above.

The structure, however, can be preserved to some extent, if there is another way of conveying which words modify which. Latin declines, i.e. uses the endings of words to convey that. Color coding can do just the same thing, e.g. "proditor" and "risus" can be translated in situ as the blue words "betraying" and "laughter".

Nota bene that in the above poem words agree with those directly above/below them, thereby greatly increasing its niftiness.

nilstycho, Jul 05 2004

Horace, Ode 1.9 http://www.merriampark.com/horcarm19.htm
Rougher translation and context. [jutta, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

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       I'm not sure I get what this is about.   

       You want to color the word in the translation the same as the matching word in the original?
Or you want to color two words that are grammatically related in both? Don't you need to encode more than just their connection?
  

       (Is it a bretrayed or a betraying laughter, or is someone laughing at betrayal?)
jutta, Jul 05 2004
  
      
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