Expert: Maria - 1/29/2009

Question
Dear Maria,
I am an officer in the U.S. Army Health Facility Planning Agency.  We are responsible for planning, designing, constructing and equipping health care facilities for the Army.  Our motto is “Facilitating Care”, which is particularly appropriate in that we don’t actually deliver healthcare ourselves, we FACILITATE it for the doctors and nurses through well-designed FACILITIES.  Can you translate “Facilitating Care” into Latin, hopefully retaining some of the vestiges of the root word “facil-“ so that it is somewhat recognizable in English, and if possible, emphasizing the continuing nature of our work (e.g. facilitatING care is something that we are doING, not just something that we do…if that makes sense) ?
Thanks


Answer
Hello,

since you asked me to retain “some of the vestiges of the  root word “facil-“ so that it is somewhat recognizable in English“, I can suggest the following translations:

-“Faciliores reddere curationes” (Facilitating care)

Or:

-“Faciliores nostrum est reddere curationes” (it's our job/ duty  to facilitate care).

See below for grammatical analysis.

Hope these Latin sentences correspond to your purpose.
Feel free however to ask me again, should you have some doubt.

Best regards,
Maria
_______________________________________________________________
Note that:

-FACILIORES REDDERE = facilitating.
In Latin we use the infinitive REDDERE (from REDDO) plus the comparative FACILIORES (from FACILIS) agreed with CURATIONES.

-CURATIONES(accusative plural of CURATIO, 3rd.declension. Latin prefers to use the plural)
______________________________________________________________

-FACILIORES… REDDERE (see above) = to facilitate

-NOSTRUM (nominative neuter of the possessive NOSTER, our)= our job

-EST(from the verb SUM, I am)= it is

-CURATIONES (see above)= care

As you can see, Latin word order can be different from English simply because  Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the endings, not by the order of the words.