5

I used Google Translate to translate "I see the world" to Latin. Google gave me "I videre mundum." Is this correct? If not, what would be correct and what did Google actually give me?

Joonas Ilmavirta
  • 113,294
  • 21
  • 192
  • 587
8cookie
  • 51
  • 2
  • 5
    Google Translate gave you gibberish. It is very bad for Latin, and here it does not produce a grammatical complete sentence. videre is the present active infinitive of video, so, literally, "to see." mundum is the accusative singular of mundus, in this context "world; universe." These words are not combined in a way that would make sense as a sentence; you'd have to conjugate the verb for it to do so. – AlabamaScholiast Feb 06 '22 at 14:17
  • 2
    *I at the front is not Latin at all, if it is supposed to be a word; the machine seems to be either (a) mistakenly treating it as an untranslated proper name, or possibly (b) mistakenly treating it as the Roman numeral I, i.e., 1 -- for reasons that I'm sure make sense inside a patchy computer model but don't make sense to me. Latin for "I," the speaker (1st person pronoun in nominative singular), is ego, but you usually wouldn't use this pronoun explicitly in a sentence if it is clear from the conjugation of the verb. – AlabamaScholiast Feb 06 '22 at 14:23
  • 4
    When I put "I see the world into Google Translate, I get "video mundum," which is a valid response, but not the most typical order of the words used in Classical Latin. – Vegawatcher Feb 06 '22 at 14:53

2 Answers2

10

As usual with Latin, Google gave you nonsense. It's not even wholly in Latin, so translating is pointless.

The simplest valid translation is mundum video. Whether that's the right choice for you depends on the context, but it's a pretty safe bet. You can edit your question to add details about the use context you had in mind.

Joonas Ilmavirta
  • 113,294
  • 21
  • 192
  • 587
5

The word mundus has lots of different meanings, including “ornament”, “clean”, “the cosmos, the universe”. If you are talking about the planet earth it would be less ambiguous to use orbis terrarum, in your case orbem terrarum video.

fdb
  • 17,845
  • 1
  • 23
  • 47