Subject: Re: [lojban] le stura be la gihuste

From: Elrond <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 09:08:41 +0200 (CET)

On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:

> At 09:02 PM 08/22/2000 +0200, Elrond wrote:
> >mi ba'e ba'o djica le zu'o mi fanva la gihuste la fasybau
> 
> Using ba'o there rather than pu'o means that you are in the aftermath of 
> wanting to translate the list, whereas context suggests that you wanted pu'o
True that "ba'o" is not what I meant; however it is not "pu'o" either, but
"de'a". See below.

> 
> >.iku'i oio'onaisai mi pu fapro le stura be la gihuste le ka klijmi je
> >dikni je ke zu'o galfi ke'ebo frili
> 
> The current structure of the gismu list is designed for 
> LogFlash. Translations need not abide by the structure, and perhaps should 
> not try to do so. AFTER a translation is done, a LogFlash-compatible 
> structure could be devised for French Lojbanists who might wish to use 
> LogFlash with French to Lojban keywords.
AFAIK (or, I hope ?) the gismu list was not done only for Logflash's
purposes! 

ni'o

even though those were rare, I found a few moments of free time
during my trip to Thailand (jbo-story soon, promise!) during which I
studied various Lojbanic issues. More especially, I started thinking about
what would be required to do more clear and/or understandable
Lojban-to-English translations, and more generally Lojban-to-other
languages.

Indeed, while the jbofi'e does its work quite well (thanks to
richard), it does so with quite much difficulties: as for any automated
translation tool, extracting place names/keywords and the grammar of
relationships from the current gismu list is a f... mess.

But this state of things is not only an issue for automated
translation tools; indeed, while thinking about a possible translation of
the gismu list to my mother tongue, French, it proved that the current
format makes it tremendously hard to translate it to languages such as
french, where words have several different forms (verb, noun, and so on):
such a translation would impose, if using the current format, a painful
choice between 
a) a very verbose file where all forms of words are listed
for the sake of easing searches, 
or b) a compact (like now) file where only a few forms of words are
listed, and where searches are made difficult because searching for a
concept implies searching for many different words before finding the
right one.
<rant>if English had different forms for verbs and their
associated nouns, I bet some people would have thought a little bit
more about it *before* writing the gismu list...</rant>

No, seriously. Of course I could start a translation in whatever
formt suits my needs. However, from a computer hobbyist standpoint, I feel
like having as much as different formats as there are different
translation is a major mistake. At the even thought of having two versions
of every lojban-related program to study in French or English, I feel a
strong headache coming.

What I want to stress here is the fact that the various lists
*must* be reformatted to improve the efficiency and simplicity of
automated tools, be they translation tools, typesetting programs, word
lookups, and so on. It also *should* be reformatted for any translation
(of english words into another natural language) in order to create a
standardized format readable by a single version of any automated tool.

I have several ideas about what would be the important criteria to
be considered when choosing a new format for the various lists (the gismu
list is not the only problem, of course, the current lujvo and cmavo lists
are no more easy to feed into automations). These ideas might just be
complete crap and/or bullshit, but yet I tried to find a consistent
scheme: while several days ago, when I first started to think seriously
about translating the gismu list in my native tongue (I do not master English 
enough to master Logflash), I could not do anything more than translating
the keywords, because the syntax of the translation field is
obnoxious; now with those several ideas, I can already think about
having standardized tools, more complex translation capabilities and so
on, both for French AND English versions of the list. Ask for further
details.
However, I cannot, and do not want to start working on anything
before further comments from other people: I want to know whether there
are other people interested in a standard format or if it is actually
preferable to translate in whatever format suits the new language's
purposes. Working in the blind and in the fear of re-doing everything
someday (like what will be needed for the English version at one point)
just sinks my will completely.

Regards
raph