How's your Latin?

The closest to "surrender" I can think of is "concedere" (to concede / yield / give up). "We will not surrender" would thus be something like:

Non concedebimus (future tense, first-person plural)

That's the straight first-person plural active voice future tense. It'll work if this is more or less a rallying cry that an army or whatever is using to psych themselves up. How do you pronounce that? More or less like:

non kon-say-day-BEE-moose

If it's the reverse, if it's some sort of a weird threat or whatever with the person saying it telling an opponent that the opponent had better not expect any mercy (i.e. "we won't let you surrender, we're just going to kill you"), then that's more like "oh no you shall not surrender!" then you've got:

Non concedebitis

That's, confusingly, still straight active voice future tense, but now in the second-person (you) form. This particular verb tense is also used in Latin for the so-called "indicative mood" which in English we render with "shall."

God I hated Latin in High School. Anyway, there are some good online English->Latin dictionaries if you google for them, and a pretty direct latin grammar reference here:

http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~econrad/lang/latin.html

If you have other stuff you need to translate, go there and poke through the "noun declension paradigm" and "verb conjugation paradigm" pages until you figure out what particular noun case or verb tense you need, look up the noun or verb you want through one of the online dictionaries, then go to the grammar page for the tables of how to decline / conjugate that specific category of noun or verb.

Lapochka (YA emotional journey / travel adventure):
A young woman searches for her missing father through clues hidden in Soviet-era Russian comic books.

Also check out my writing blog at: http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/

Oh yay!! -showers with tootsie rolls and wintergreen mints- Thanks SO much!

You're welcome! And while I readily admit a fondness for wintergreen, I'd much rather be showered with covert art nominations over in this thread:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3390405

I mean, if you're at all inclined. I'm just saying. :)

Lapochka (YA emotional journey / travel adventure):
A young woman searches for her missing father through clues hidden in Soviet-era Russian comic books.

Also check out my writing blog at: http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/

Can I suggest an alternative? How about "semper invicta" which means "always the unconquered, or always invincible".

The funny thing about latin mottos is that straight translation doesn't always work. Conjugating the closest latin verb sometimes means you lose some of the elegance of a classical latin motto. They are often means of showing off a motto inventor's facility at the language.

My caveat is my latin is mostly medieval based and most latinists will know that is the land of the clunky "bad latin"

Another possibility I came across is "nulla deditio", assuming the word "surrender" as a noun instead of a verb. Don't take my word for it, my Latin is horrible, I came across it from googling it and it was posted as a suggested translation on some other forum for the same question.

Nolite Concedere (plural) or Noli Concedere (singular) are the negative command forms for the phrase "Don't Surrender"

I'm using a bit of Latin in my novel too. i think the best thing is too use the translators online to get a generic translation. Then in December go through a do a proper translation while you have more time.

Oh wow i need Latin for my book too!! I was actually thinking of only using like select words that i could get from a translator because i'm always scared that if i use a translator too much, then someone can call me out who actually speaks latin. :O