Why isn't there a good Latin translator on the Web?

There's no bit market for an english to latin translator program, and so there's also no free even-worse-than-the-current-state-of-the-art (which is still pretty bad) version because they've made the damn thing already anyway. Babelfish is basicly (or at least used to be) a systran demo intended to get people to buy the full product.

They'll worry about translating live languages less poorly before they worry about translating into dead languages.

It would also have a very limited use. Most colloquial phrases that you see translated into Latin take a lot of liberties-- a long-dead language is missing a lot of new concepts after 1600 years. It could be useful for pretty dry stuff, but conversational ideas translated into Latin take a lot of creativity that software doesn't have. The Latin that we know comes mostly through church documents and inscriptions and a few other formalities. Conversational style in Latin is largely conjecture.

Seriously, what substrate said. There isn't a good anything translator on the Web.

Latin's http://www.yleradio1.fi/zgo.php?z=20031213201140852741.

I've played with Japanese-to-English software that has actually been kind of "cool". It was not anything that would give you a real translation, but you could still get a good feel for what the text was talking about. Very useful when you know all of about 6 kanji (and that's six more than the average American....) Now, with Latin, if you're an educated English speaker, you really ought to be able to just look at the text and at least get a feel for what the subject matter is. If there were software to do the same thing with Latin that my old Japanese software did, it would tell you that aqua = water....which, really, people oughta know already...plus just a little basic grammar. The other side of it is that when you dig into Tacitus or Horace or somebody, and you face absolute constructions, dative of agent, passive periphrastic, and all the joys of 3rd-year Latin, that's stuff that I really would hate to have to code into software. Way too many nuances. I'd be much happier to keep the translation task manual, as a bastion of Renaissance humanism. That's Latin-to-English. English-to-Latin is generally done by: --people who think a phrase will look neat carved into a coat of arms over their bar, or --people who work for the Vatican. There's probably someone in the Vatican right now coming up with the official phrases for "reality show" or "low-carb lifestyle".

Now, with Latin, if you're an educated English speaker, you really ought to be able to just look at the text and at least get a feel for what the subject matter is. What? I took a Latin class where we had to translate stuff into Latin. Stuff like "Caesar would have said that we should try to establish peace first" or "Domotius waited so long that he was unable to join Pompey". One of the questions on the final exam was to translate "No one thought Puff Daddy [Tata Tumens] would be convicted". I wish I still retained that knowledge, it was really helpful for translating out of Latin and understanding what was going on.

Have you checked out http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_PersInfo.html#interactive?

i'm going to second the Perseus Project (sciurus's link). It's a wonderful tool if you can't quite translate Latin (Greek, in my case), but have a specific passage you need to get to the heart of. Every word is a link to a dictionary definition that includes the root word and the possible declensions. It certainly saved my ass on numerous occasions.