03.05.24: the two steps of translation

A member made a great comment on a quotation that was being discussed:

errāre hūmānum est, persevērāre autem diabolicum

It was used to show that, in Latin and in English, the infinitives match ie.

to make mistakes is human, but to persist in them is diabolical

I then talked about the "two stages of translation"

[i] to make mistakes is human, but to persist in them is diabolical.

That is stage #1: the literal translation to recognise the grammatical structures and to see that those structures match.

A member then, quite rightly, wrote:

"Put in idiomatic English: making mistakes is human; persisting in them ... is diabolical."

The member gives stage [ii] i.e. the one that sounds more natural in English, and he couldn't have picked a better one i.e. errāre and persevērāre are infinitives - and, at the learning stage, they need to be recognised as such - only then, once you go past stage [i], you then put them it into stage [ii].

As I mentioned, you can't by-pass stage #1 otherwise you might think that those infinitives errāre and persevērāre have some in-built -ing meaning, but they don't although they are often used to convey that idea.

And it will come up again and again the more Latin you're dealing with and how it is best translated.