# Difficult Latin abstract



## deLumren

I`m currently editing a translation for one Spanish book and it contains a long and sophisticated text in Latin which I have no hope translating myself. It reads:

"Cipsa plicae audipsam volumquiae veles dolorion voprorisincit, ut vente andit ditatestium resendaes etur?
Lectempore nosaese picab orectur, sit vel id eume parum"

The book is about human memory and the chapter I've taken this abstact from provides advice on how to improve memory capacity.

Help me please and thanks in advance


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## wandle

deLumren said:


> which I have no hope translating myself.


Nor has anyone else, I am afraid.

There is something very wrong with that text. There are only five, or at a stretch six, actual Latin words. Even they convey nothing.

The rest is nonsense: perhaps there was some Latin there originally, but it looks as if the text had been passed through a virus-infected computer, which jumbled the words and letters up to produce gibberish.


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## Cagey

Is any source given for the Latin? 

What is the title of the Spanish book?

As wandle says, it is hardly Latin, though it is possible to pick out Latin words in it.


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## deLumren

Uploaded image seems too small. Here it is on image hosting service
http  postimg (dot) org/image/xl56bh0br/

Here's how it looks in Spanish pdf version of the book.
The book itself is "El Libro de la Memoria" by Angels Navarro.
No context is given for this abstract, it seems rather odd in general.
Sometimes author uses indivudal words from Catalan language, but this does not look like it (though I'm not sure).


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## wandle

When we complete the link to the image hosting service and go there, we find a page which is the start of a chapter on how to improve memory. The above nonsense text is on its own in a side panel. The Spanish text does not in any way explain it or even refer to it. The page discusses factors which help or hinder memory, among them complexity and (in)attention. 

I would like to see the next page of the Spanish text, since it is presumably there that the text in the side panel is referred to or explained. At present, given the above context, my best guess is that it is included as an example of how difficult it is to memorise nonsense, compared with the much easier task of remembering something that makes sense (even if it is an artificial sense invented by ourselves for the purpose of memorising).

Probable conclusion:  for the purpose of translating the book, there will be no question of 'translating' the nonsense text, since it is intended to be nonsense. You would simply need to transliterate it into the Russian alphabet.


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## deLumren

I've been told in the Catalan subforum that it's not Catalan language either, so it only leaves one option. It does in fact look like artificially crafted gibberish, but previously in the book this side panel format was used to highlight key ideas or introduce the readers to some fun facts. A standard tool for magazines and pop-science books, that's why I thought it is something valuable and worth translating. 
Further on in the Exercise section readers are often tasked to memorize different information that obviously makes no sense, just to train memory. I guess I'll just leave it like this or place some gibberish pseudo-Russian text there.

And no, next page sheds no more light on the essense of this abstract than the page I uploaded, but if you want to see it for yourself, here it is:
http postimg (dot) org/image/q1pd1pla9/


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## wandle

Well, that page does point out that we need to understand in order to remember and when we do not understand something, we forget it. Perhaps the author simply intends the reader to draw that inference from the nonsense text. Another point it might be making is that in general when something arouses our curiosity, we pay more attention to it and try to understand it, which makes it easier to recall.

By the way, English 'abstract' in this context means 'summary': typically a brief preliminary summary at the start of an academic or scientific paper. 'Extract' on the other hand is the word for a passage taken from a larger text.


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## swift

Salvete!

I think it's just a filler text the editor forgot to delete.  You know, something along the line of _Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet_ or At lignati ut quunt alitation essimo.


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## wandle

Of course, that is it! It is just a placeholder for something else which was meant to fill that panel, but the author or editor forgot to make the substitution.


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## deLumren

Okay, thank you for your help!
And yeah, "abstract" and "extract" always confused me and this time I didn't bother to check if I used the correct one. Abstract is just the one that I use and see more often while working on my Ph. D, so it is usually the first one that comes to mind. Sorry


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