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I spent a large part of the afternoon on AIM with Amy, discussing with her the right ways to translate principium and principiatum. Principium by itself was easy: It means something like 'origin, beginning' but also 'principle' (as in both the adjective and the noun), and I knew that this was the kind of meaning I wanted. A principiatum, on the other hand, is something depends on a principium (a principium being that which a principiatum depends on). I first had 'of principles', but that wasn't right grammatically or semantically. For a while, I considered 'derivative', because the distinction between 'principle' and 'derivative' is the right distinction, but I didn't like that, because 'derivative' has its own Latin root, and that root isn't principiatum, and if 'derivative' was really the best word in this context, the author wouldn't have used principiatum. Then we toyed with making the pair be 'original' and 'originated', but this was also not the best fit, because the Latin words are nouns, not substantive adjectives. But this was better than nothing. Finally, I decided to see if there was anything useful in the OED s.v. principle. And that was when I saw in the sidebar an entry for the word 'principiate'. That's exactly the word I wanted; the etymology section of the entry even confirms that it's from principiatus, of which principiatum is just the neuter form. And then I read the example quotes in the entry. There's just two, and they're both from the 17th century, and the latter is from Burthogge's 1694 textbook Reason:

"Of Substances some are Principles, some Principiates... By Principiates (give me leave to make an English word of one not very good Latin) I mean substances that are caused or composed of Principles. Principles make, Principiates are made to be."

I love it! I'm not the only one who struggled with how to represent this word in English! And this is exactly the distinction which my author was making in his text.

I'm currently translating the section on metaphysics in Jacob Lorhard's 1606 book Ogdoas Scholastica. This has been an interesting exercise in various respects - it's my first foray into 17th-century Latin, my first translation which will be used by people other than me (and so I can't leave vague questions and bad grammar in it!), it isn't really a narrative or an argument, but rather one huge complicated flow-chart. (Take a look at the first page.), and it's written by a 17th-century philosopher.

I've run into a number of interesting things.

- There's a couple of places, more than I'd like unfortunately, where I'm not translating anything, because the best corresponding modern English phrase simply IS the Latin. (E.g. the distinction between simpliciter and secundum quid. And sometimes I'm torn between leaving realiter as it is and finding a clunky translation.) I feel a bit weird that there is so much Latin in a text which I'm technically supposed to be translating out of Latin! It'd be like finding filet mignon over and over in a text you're translating from French to English.
- This is crammed full of technical vocabulary where the Latinization is very superficial, and you can basically hack of the ending and have a word. However, it's not necessarily a word that you'd find it common use. I've found myself often heading to the OED to find out "is 'accidentality' a REAL word?" And if I can find a 17th-century citation for the word, even if those are the only citations listed, I'll use it. After all, a translation of a 17th-C Latin word into 17th-C English vocabulary will probably result in something closer to the original, and people who are reading this should be smart enough to figure out what accidentality is.
- On the other hand, because I'm using so many rather antiquated words, I feel like I'm giving the reader silent instruction to "when faced with an unusual or unexpected word, read it as if this was the 17th century". Then I come to things like quasi partes. I want to be able to translate this into a rather nice modern idiom, "virtual parts", but given my implicit instruction to the reader based on my use of other words, I'm afraid that this will end up being read in a 17th-century mindset, too, when what I want is it to be read modernly!

I'm really enjoying all these intricacies and tricky bits. There is a lot more depth and width to translating than I ever realized before I started.