How do you start to go about translating a sentence?

The best way to translate a sentence, in both Latin and Greek is to do it step by step. To have a method and structure when attempting to translate a sentence into English. Before translating something, it is important to do the work behind the sentence- learning vocabulary and the different verb and noun forms. If you need to use a dictionary (and star the words you didn't know to learn in the future) then you can. Once you have identified all the words in a sentence you can start to translate step by step, I am going to use a simple sentence as an example: οἱ Ἕλληνες δέκα ἔτη ἐμάχοντο τοῖς ΤρωσίνFirst Identify the verb and take into account what person, number, voice and mood it is in. So here the verb is ἐμάχοντο which is the 3rd person plural, imperfect indicative (middle/passive) form of μάχομαι meaning to fight. So we know that the subject of the sentence must be plural. Next find the subject of the sentence. Greek uses a definite article which changes based on the case of the noun it is being used with so if you learn your definite article cases, it is easy to know that οἱ Ἕλληνες (The Greeks) must be the subject because both the definite article and the noun itself are in the nominative plural. Next, the object of the word. Now often, the object will be in the accusative case, but some verbs take a case so that the object of the verb is not in an accusative but in this specific case. We have this in our sentence because the verb μάχομαι takes the dative case, therefore the object in this sentence is τοῖς Τρωσίν, (with the Trojans). We know this is in the dative case thanks to both the definite article and the noun itself.Finally to finish translating this sentence, we look at any other parts of the sentence which have not yet been translated. In this sentence we have a time clause: δέκα ἔτη. Different types of temporal clauses take different cases. Here our time clause is in the accusative, indicating time how long. Leaving us with the translation of 'for 10 years'.Finally we put everything together!! taking steps 1-4 we translate the sentence as The Greeks (subject) were fighting (main verb) with the Trojans (object) for 10 years (extra bits).