Translate "Deal from strength or get crushed every time" to Latin?
January 21, 2016 3:20 AM   Subscribe

Title says it all. I tried the online translation, but even with my twenty-year-old-intro-Latin, I could tell they weren't great. How would you translate that into Latin? I'm really looking for two sorts of translations: one literal, and one short and "motto"-like.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike to Writing & Language (5 answers total)
 
The traditional phrase is "Si vis pacem, para bellum".
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:37 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Chocolate Pickle has a great version - but I have general advice, as I recently had to do this for a different phrase.

The auto-Google translate gave me both awkward and inaccurate translations. What worked much better was using Google to translate each significant word, pick the best option (both of mine had over a dozen Latin equivalents) for meaning & sound, then use wikipedia to look up which declension/conjugation, and formulate (in case, like me, you've blotted out most of your Latin grammar except for the fact that Latin has grammar).
posted by jb at 7:44 AM on January 21, 2016


The traditional phrase is "Si vis pacem, para bellum".

Vae Victis also has some of the original flavor.
posted by sukeban at 7:51 AM on January 21, 2016


(There's also the issue that playing cards arrived to Europe IIRC in the late Middle Ages, and ancient Romans were more likely to gamble with dice or sheep bones: this is why the most famous Latin saying about gambling is Caesar's "the dice have been thrown". I'm not aware of Medieval Latin mottoes that use playing cards imagery, but chess could be an alternative)
posted by sukeban at 8:01 AM on January 21, 2016


(I would guess OP meant deal as in negotiate, not cards specifically)

I also thought of the famous line from Thucydides: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Greek text can be found here. It's less comprehensible than Latin, perhaps, but if you just wanted something you knew the meaning of, and didn't care about other people trying to translate it could be good.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:22 AM on January 21, 2016


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