So, I was playing with Google Translate as I sometimes do, and I put in the phrase “mistakes were made”. It shows the Latin translation to be “facta sunt peccata” which seems to literally translate to -facts are sins-.
So I have two questions:
Does that particular translation capture the essence of the English phrase?
How does the program decide the translated word choice? That is, when I enter only “mistakes were” I get “errores eius” not facta sunt.
I’m sure my example in 2 sucks but I’m not sure how else to phrase it.
In “facta sunt peccata”, “peccata” is the subject (peccatum, peccati = fault, error, mistake, blunder, sin) and “facta sunt” is the verb (facio, feci, factum = do, make, act). Although if I’m not mistaken, “facta sunt” is the present indicative passive, so “facta sunt peccata” = “mistakes are made”. I think it should be “facta erant peccata” for past tense.
I can’t answer the questions about how Google translate works, except to note that it usually works poorly.
I can’t help with the translation, but I want to mention that this phrase has its own Wikipedia entry, and in that entry, there is this line which just made my week:
I wouldn’t have caught the tense, and didn’t consider synonyms when I used the same program to find the meaning of “peccata”. It makes more sense now. Is there a decent app for translations or do they all fall down on the finer points?
Yes, but while we “make” a mistake in English, I’m not sure a Roman would have “fecit” a “peccatum”. In English we use “make” and “do” in a huge range of contexts where other languages employ more specific verbs. The Latin verb “errare” means “to err, to make a mistake” and, while I have forgotten nearly all the Latin I ever knew (which wasn’t that much) I’m pretty sure that the authoritative answer to this question is going to employ some passive form of that verb.
“Erratum” is a thing which has been mistaken, an error. “Errata” would be errors, or things which have been mistaken. “Errata sunt” would mean “there are things which have been mistaken” or “things have gone wrong/gone astray”. That’s as close as I can get, but I’m happy to be corrected.
Latin also uses “make” and “do” (“facio” and “ago”) in a huge range of contexts, which overlap significantly (but not completely) with the ranges English uses for those words.
No. If you used the verb “to err” as the verb in the phrase in question, you’d get “mistakes were erred.” That’s not what he wants. Errare is, I believe, intransitive, taking no direct object.
Only if you also used “peccatum” or some variant in the phrase as well, which is not what I was suggesting.
Peccatum means sin, fault. It’s from pecco, to sin. It means “mistake” in the sense of a culpable, intentional action.
Erratum, from erro means a mistake, a misdirection, a going astray. It doesn’t imply culpability or deliberateness.
Since the whole point of the “mistakes were made” euphemism is to avoid or deflect culpability, to avert responsibility or accountability, a translation into Latin needs to use erro rather than pecco if it is to capture that sense.
I just went to google translate, and looked for the difference between two sentences: “A fire started” and “A fire was started”. In most languages, the translations differed, but in Spanish and Korean, they were exactly identical.
The connotations in English are that the first one blames the fire, and the second blames the arsonist. But not all languages seem to honor that “past exonerative” tense.
Charmingly, the Google Latin was completely stymied by the whole thing, offering “Ignis started” and “A ignis started”.
Errāta sunt facta seems perfectly adequate for the literal meaning. However, the passive voice is not marked in Latin the way it is in English. The sense that the phrase is weasily is lost.
But Latin, unlike English, can say “someone erred” without using a separate word for the “someone”, which might bring it closer to the intended meaning.
This thread reminds me of one of my favorite puns.
After exceeding his orders to simply put down rebels and instead conquering all of Sindh Province, Major General Charles Napier was facetiously said to have sent a one word dispatch to his superiors which was, simply, “Peccavi.”
Thing is, in English, passive words often sound clunky, so if I say “mistakes were made” rather than “I screwed up,” my awkward phrasing is obvious. In English, “Mistakes were made” SOUNDS immediately evasive and dishonest.
But in Latin, many standard phrases use such indirect language. So a direct translation of “Mistakes were made” might not sound weaselly to Caesar.
The other thing that makes that phrase weasly is who’s saying it. If an investigative reporter says “mistakes were made”, then the implication is that the reporter is going to figure out who made them, and nail them to the wall as soon as they do. But when it’s said by the very person who made the mistakes, it’s a way of saying “It’s not my fault, it’s the mistakes’ fault”.
