Google Translate is a free and easily accessible Web-based machine translation program that today enables users to upload text in over 100 languages. Although the accuracy of Google Translate has improved significantly for modern language pairs since Google replaced its phrase-based statistical system with a neural machine translation system in late 2016, its ability to translate Latin to English and English to Latin was relatively poor in 2024 and 2025. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in current scholarship by undertaking a case study on the use of Google Translate by tertiary-level beginner Latin students. It asks whether student use of Google Translate in assessment exercises submitted in an ‘Introductory Latin’ course in 2024 and 2025 helped them to build foundational Latin grammar, reading, and comprehension skills successfully. It also evaluates the impact on learning and skill development by analysing student use of Google Translate at different stages of their ‘Introductory Latin’ course, examining whether these beginner Latin students were able to identify many of Google Translate’s grammatical and lexical errors, or recognise misleading translations from English into Latin and vice versa.

This is a review of the activities and successes of the 46th residential JACT Latin Summer School, run in July-August 2026. Specifically it covers our typical teaching arrangement, programmes of lectures, trips and events and acknowledges the generosity of our sponsors.

Students of Latin and Ancient Greek are frequently asked to analyse the effects of authors’ linguistic choices. Yet much of their access to classical literature is mediated through English translations whose choices may receive comparatively little attention. This article introduces translation literacy as the ability to recognise translation as an interpretive act and to examine its choices, alternatives, and consequences. Drawing on my experience as a GCSE Latin and Ancient Greek student, I argue that fluent English translations can create an impression of direct and uncomplicated access to an ancient text. I describe this gap between apparent access and critical understanding as false fluency. To address it, I propose TRACE, a classroom framework organised around five questions: text and transmission, range of meaning, alternatives, consequences, and evaluation. TRACE offers teachers and students a practical vocabulary for distinguishing the translated text from the original, discussing significant word choices and treating translation as a form of reasoned interpretation.

This work focuses on an educational project for third-year students in Italian classical high schools, integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into the study of Latin. Using tools like ChatGPT, the project explores innovative methods to enhance linguistic and cultural understanding while promoting ethical AI use. Generative AI enables the study and learning of Latin language and culture through new solutions. This educational activity encourages critical thinking and dialogue on translational and linguistic choices, improving the ability to analyse Latin texts, formulate sentences in Latin, and better understand basic and everyday grammar. Creativity and active use of Latin are also emphasised. Collaborative and individual working methods facilitate the exploration of AI’s advantages and limitations, enriching traditional pedagogy with a modern, interactive approach. The project consists of five modules, each exploring how to integrate AI into the current teaching program for third-year students. Specifically, the modules aim to enhance students’ capabilities in analysing and translating Latin texts, highlighting differences between human-generated and AI-generated results. Students critically compare these methods, refining their grammatical and syntactical understanding. Collaboration and cooperation among students are also emphasised. For example, they use AI to create dialogues in Latin inspired by Plautus’s conversational style. The impact of the activity is assessed through an analysis of students’ translations, ethical reflections, and methodological insights. In this paper, we will share our experience with this experiment, which aims, with the help of technology, to present Latin as a dynamic and living language, underscoring the enduring relevance of the classical tradition in contemporary education.

This braided essay brings together contemporary concerns, personal memoir, and medieval studies. Specifically, it responds to a feeling of anger regarding current political situations, by meditating on medieval Irish instances of, and reflections on, that emotion. The whole exemplifies the technique of the braided essay which I used to larger-scale effect in an earlier book, Fierce Appetites, and implicitly makes the case that a different register—and particularly an emotional honesty—is permissible in “public” writing in a way that would not usually be accepted in traditional academic discourse.

A cosmopolis may be understood as a durable, cross–regional cultural–political order in which a prestigious bridge language provides the central anchor and the shared medium for knowledge, cultural authority and institutional practice across multilingual settings. In this article I hypothesise that, in the early 21st century, English in international employ is beginning to occupy a socio–cultural position comparable in certain respects to that of the pre‑modern formations associated with Sanskrit, Latin and Classical Arabic. To examine this possibility, I begin with a deliberately broad, first‑pass identification of the most salient cosmopolis features, limiting the analysis to the characteristic profile of the prestige bridge language that underwrites each cosmopolis. I then consider whether a comparable profile plausibly holds for global modern English, drawing on existing research on its global role. The results are preliminary, but they suggest that this perspective may offer a useful analytical lens for investigating English in its present sociolinguistic position, and that it merits more systematic follow‑up work.

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

Scholarship on Scandinavian linguistics has long recognised an indigenous metalinguistic tradition, rooted in runic writing and skaldic poetry, that developed independently of Latin influence. This tradition coexisted with Latin learning in a dynamic interplay often termed ‘two cultures’, culminating in the Icelandic grammatical treatises (12th to 14th centuries). While debates persist over the treatises’ indigenous versus foreign influences, the methods of Latin teaching in medieval Iceland remain underexamined. Though recent work has addressed Latin textual presence and educational structures, the pedagogical techniques themselves – how Latin was taught – have yet to be explored. This study aims to fill this gap, analysing methods and techniques of teaching Latin in medieval Iceland and offering new insights into the negotiation of vernacular and Latin traditions.

The article discusses why Classics is important and why its study benefits not just university students but also young children. It was runner-up in the Intermediate Category for a Classical Association competition in 2025. The article explores the value of Classics as a wonderfully diverse subject involving the study of history, archaeology, architecture, art, and literature. Classics enables students to study over a thousand years of history, to uncover cultural values, to discover how language operates, to develop critical analysis skills, and to delight in its timeless literature. The article explores how the study of Classics can benefit young students’ reading and writing proficiency and can be especially beneficial for those with special educational needs. It explores how Latin translation builds code cracking and cognitive skills, not only developing grammatical knowledge but also encouraging problem-solving suited to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-based subjects such as computer science and maths. The article looks at the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and the benefits of learning Latin and Greek vocabulary for language learning and science.