Another 'Translate this to Latin, please' thread

Over in this thread, Rand Rover posted:

“If you can’t get away from it with a short burst of speed, then you need to turn around and kill it.”

I’m thinking of making it my new motto but it would sound so much cooler in Latin. Can someone do this for me? Pretty please.
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How about Nisi fugere potest, advertere interfecereque necesse est?

Literally, ‘Unless it is possible to flee, it is necessary to turn around and kill.’

I’m not very good at Latin, so can you explain why it’s interfecere and not interficere? Some subjunctive stem-change?

It’s called a typo. :slight_smile:

Just as a cautionary note (and because I can never resist linking to this blog post), be sure your translation is really good before you put it in a tattoo :smiley:

Si fugere ab eo minima cum celeritate potes ; tibi deinde volvendum est atque id caedendum tibia est

hey sorry, that was from my phone, so it was really hard to type out Latin stuff. Mine says if you are able to flee from it with a very small speed;…Oops, so either put in non, or change si to nisi like the other guy had…
minima (with a macron over the a) cum celeritate - with the slightest speed. That’s normally how they express speed, as in magna cum celeritate is “with great swiftness”. If you want it to literally be “with a short burst of speed” then that would be " cum brevI eruptiOne celeritAtis" (the capital letters should have a macron over them).

As for the second part, necessity is often expressed using the passive periphrastic, which is what I’ve done here…it’s hard to translate literally into English, but thats what it means

tibi deinde volvendum est atque id caedendum tibia est

you then must turn around and it is to be killed by you (i.e. you must slaughter it) (tibia should be tibi, stupid autocorrect)

you could also have

volvere id interficereque dEbEs
you ought to turn around and kill it (hack it to pieces), again, the capital letters should have macrons and not be capitalized (well, actually, everything should be capitalized because they didnt use lower case), but I don’t know how to do that on this computer. Don’t worry, they wouldn’t change the meaning of this, but it actually would kind of change the meaning of “minima”.

Your link got me thinking (not that I trust it any farther than I can throw it but) Google Translate gives this:

Effugere non possis cum summa celeritate lenis autem revertimini et abite occiderit oportet.

Cool, thanks!

oops, ran out of edit time…here’s the edited post

hey sorry, that was from my phone, so it was really hard to type out Latin stuff. Mine says if you are able to flee from it with a very small speed;…Oops, so either put in non, or change si to nisi like the other guy had…
minima (with a macron over the a) cum celeritate - with the slightest speed. That’s normally how they express speed, as in magna cum celeritate is “with great swiftness”. If you want it to literally be “with a short burst of speed” then that would be " cum brevI eruptiOne celeritAtis" (the capital letters should have a macron over them).

As for the second part, necessity is often expressed using the passive periphrastic (as in “Carthago delenda est” - “Carthage must be destroyed!”, which is what I’ve done here…it’s hard to translate literally into English, but thats what it means

tibi deinde volvendum est atque id caedendum tibi est

you then must turn around and it is to be killed by you (i.e. you must slaughter it) (tibia should be tibi, stupid autocorrect). For the first part of that, the tibi might actually supposed to be A tE, depending on whether volvere is intransitive. I didn’t see that info in my dictionary. The second clause is correct

you could also have

volvere id interficereque dEbEs
you ought to turn around and kill it (hack it to pieces), again, the capital letters should have macrons and not be capitalized (well, actually, everything should be capitalized because they didnt use lower case), but I don’t know how to do that on this computer. Don’t worry, they wouldn’t change the meaning of this, but it actually would kind of change the meaning of “minima”.