This paper presents an evaluation of machine translation for Latin. We tested multilingual Large Language Models, in particular GPT-4, on letters from the 16th century that are in Latin and Early New High German. Our experiments include translation and cross-language summarization for the two historical languages into modern English and German. We show that LLM-based translation for Latin is clearly superior to previous approaches. We also show that LLM-based paraphrasing of Latin paragraphs from the historical letters produces English and German summaries that are close to human summaries published in the edition.

This paper is based on a collection of 16th century letters from and to the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Around 12,000 letters of this exchange have been preserved, out of which 3100 have been professionally edited, and another 5500 are available as provisional transcriptions. We have investigated code-switching in these 8600 letters, first on the sentence-level and then on the word-level. In this paper we give an overview of the corpus and its language mix (mostly Early New High German and Latin, but also French, Greek, Italian and Hebrew). We report on our experiences with a popular language identifier and present our results when training an alternative identifier on a very small training corpus of only 150 sentences per language. We use the automatically labeled sentences in order to bootstrap a word-based language classifier which works with high accuracy. Our research around the corpus building and annotation involves automatic handwritten text recognition, text normalisation for ENH German, and machine translation from medieval Latin into modern German.

This paper outlines our work in collecting training data for and developing a Latin–German Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system, for translating 16th century letters. While Latin–German is a low-resource language pair in terms of NMT, the domain of 16th century epistolary Latin is even more limited in this regard. Through our efforts in data collection and data generation, we are able to train a NMT model that provides good translations for short to medium sentences, and outperforms GoogleTranslate overall. We focus on the correspondence of the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, but our parallel corpus and our NMT system will be of use for many other texts of the time.