The participle
dēlendus is the gerundive, or future passive participle (a tense we don’t have in English), of the verb
dēleo, meaning
I destroy (note that it is customary to express the root forms of Latin verbs in the first-person singular active indicative translation, rather than the present infinitive as it is in nearly every other language. Incidentally,
dēleo is the linguistic ancestor of the English word
delete). Thus,
dēlendus means “something that is to be destroyed”, so a
completely literal translation of the famous sentence “Carthāgō dēlenda est” would be “Carthage is something that is to be destroyed.” But that’s an awkward, wordy rendering of a phrase that takes three words to say in Latin, and we wouldn’t actually be changing the literal meaning of the phrase in any appreciable sense by simplifying this to “Carthage is to be destroyed.”
However, Cato the Censor’s famous statement is most commonly seen in English as “Carthage must be destroyed,” which is literally somewhat less accurate and doesn’t even actually fully convey the metaphorical urgency seen in the Latin phrase. If we were to translate this statement figuratively, we would be better off writing something along the lines of, “There is no option other than to destroy Carthage.”
In any case, Google Translate gets my current custom title, “Factiō Rēpublicāna dēlenda est.” – with the full stop included – as meaning “Republican Party must be destroyed.” Not
exactly accurate, as I’ve explained, but close enough; I’ll give them a grade of 90%.
Without the full stop, it gets: “Republican Party destroyed”. Grade of 75%; Google Translate’s primitive algorithm for Latin probably doesn’t understand that it’s a complete sentence without the full stop, even though “est” is very definitely a verb (it is the third-person singular active indicative case of
sum, meaning
I am).
The word
factiō is, clearly, the root of the English word
faction, which is roughly what it meant in Latin as well. Metaphorically, it
can mean a political party; in fact, the Latin-language Wikipedia actually
has an article on the Republican Party under the name “
Factio republicana (Civitates Foederatae)”. However, this is a bit of a stretch; the Romans probably would have used
partēs, which is in fact related to our word
party. (More specifically,
party descends from the related word
partīta, which is the feminine past participle of
partior, meaning “I share” or “I distribute”; or
partiēns, the past participle of
partiō, an alternate form of
partior.)
The issue here is that
partēs is also the plural of the word
pars, meaning…
part, most memorably. (Also about a dozen other things, like every other Latin word. I’m barely even exaggerating; anyone who has studied the language for more than five minutes will notice that almost every word has about a dozen different translations. And yes,
part is also etymologically related to
pars – in this case, it is a descendant of
partem, the accusative case [used for the direct object of a sentence] of
pars.) The plural,
partēs, can (and, in this context, does) mean a political party, but Google Translate seems to have no knowledge of this meaning or usage, or else no rule to handle plural words that are represented as singular nouns in English usage, or else simply not enough context to determine that this is a reference to a political party, so it gets confused.
(To be fair regarding the context, few people are probably perverse enough to write references to modern American politics in Latin. The word
Rēpublicānus technically doesn’t even exist in Latin, so it’s slightly surprising that Google even manages to figure out that. It is a back-formation from
pūblicānus, a relational adjective meaning
public revenue [also a noun meaning
tax collector or
publican], and
rēspūblica or
rēs pūblica, literally meaning
public affair or
public thing, and the origin of our word
republic. It might actually be more properly written as
Rēpūblicānus, but there’s no standardised placement for the apices in a word that is, after all, made up.)
In any case, Google Translate returns “The Republicans deleted” for my version with
partēs, with or without a full stop. Since I value at least
slightly comprehensible communication, this is not acceptable to me, even though the
partēs version is both technically and etymologically more correct. The “dēlenda est” formation is much more familiar to modern audiences than “dēlendae sunt” in any case, so I’ll only use the latter if it’s practical to have an English translation of the phrase accompanying the Latin version. (Because
partēs is plural, every other word in the sentence also has to be pluralised, due to the rules of Latin grammar;
dēlenda is the feminine singular of
dēlendus, and it just so happens that
Carthāgō and
factiō share a gender.) It’s stretching the bounds of clear communication badly enough to use the “dēlenda est” version as it is, but Cato’s quote is familiar enough that I find it more powerful to riff on it in Latin than to do the same in English.
For the record, I am not fluent in Latin. To be clear, I am not certain anyone qualifies as being fluent in what is, after all, a dead language, but I am still far from being an expert, in any case. I know just enough Latin to be dangerous, but there are still quite a number of grammar rules I haven’t got the hang of, and I almost always have to look up words, or at least cases and declensions, before I can write a sentence in Latin.