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I would like to express the following ideas in Latin, for the purpose of describing this site:

  1. Through voting, the best answers rise to more visible positions at the top of the page.
  2. You can vote on questions and answers, making the best questions and answers more visible.

My current translations are:

  1. Suffragando responsus optimi moventur sursum et pessimi deorsum.
  2. Potes scripta aliorum suffragari et ita substantiam optimam promovere.

Is suffragari a good verb for the kind of voting we have on this site? Whatever the most suitable verb is, how does it work syntactically? I was unable to figure out whether suffragari is transitive or not. How could I improve my translations?

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I'd go for suffragiis or per suffragia in the first translation instead of suffragando and suffragium ferre instead of suffragari.

I'd go with quis instead of potes, though it's a rare enough word that confusion with the nominative interrogative pronoun would probably arise. So maybe licet as in "it is possible")?

And rather than substantiam promovere I'd go with roganda responsaque optima conspicuiora ferre or maybe inlustrare, but then again as soon as anything gets abstract in Latin I start having trouble understanding it, so substantiam promovere might be better.

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  • Thanks! Suffragiis or per suffragia and suffragium ferre sound good. Quire is indeed a little problematic, but perhaps licere would indeed be a good substitute for posse in some cases. Regarding the last paragraph, I wanted to keep things simple. The words "question" and "answer" with their corresponding verbs are used so often in the surrounding text that a more general word for content is good (also in English, I suppose).
    – Joonas Ilmavirta ♦
    Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 20:40
  • Maybe then I'd go with verba? But as I say I'm biased against things like substantia(m).
    – Joel Derfner
    Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 20:49
  • @JoonasIlmavirta Yeah, looking at the L&S definition for substantia ("that of which a thing consists, the being, essence, contents, material, substance; fortune, substance, property; worldly goods") I think it's probably not the way to go. Maybe Scripta aliorum quæ suffragia accipiunt promota sunt.
    – Joel Derfner
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 2:36
  • Hmm... I looked at the very same definition and decided that it is the way to go. I was looking for a word for "content", and that seemed to match it better than others. The point of voting is to promote the best content. But scripta is a good option, too.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta ♦
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 8:05
  • @JoonasIlmavirta Yeah, I think here "content" is another idea for which we use an abstraction when Latin would use a concrete word.
    – Joel Derfner
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 11:31

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