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From: Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg@gulik.co.nz>
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Hi Christoph!

Christoph Spuhler wrote:

>Hi all,
>I don't know much about Lojban but it seems to me interesting. Just from
>looking across the websites, it seems to me that one of the purposes of
>the language is for easy parsing by computers. So, is it correct to say
>the language is basically constructed so that any written Lojban could
>(theoretically) be easily translated into any other language by a
>computer? In that case, if I wanted to write a document in many
>languages, I would write it in Lojban and have the computer translate it
>for me.
>  
>
Well... theoretically, yes. Practically, not quite yet. Practically you 
could also use http://babelfish.altavista.com (if it still exists) to 
translate between languages.

Making a good translation is a difficult task that requires much 
understanding and background knowledge of what you're translating. I've 
only translated a few things, but it is quite difficult to make a 
translation sound natural in another language. There are many cultural 
issues, and loads of illogical idioms used in colloquial language. I 
doubt a computer could do this without becoming a true AI.

For Lojban, I'll point you to 
http://www.lojban.org/en/publications/reference_grammar/chapter21.html. 
This is a formal grammer of Lojban. By using this, it is possible to 
build a parser which can check if a Lojbanic text is gramatically 
correct, and show the structure and start scratching the semantics of 
the language.

There are parsers available, but unfortunately you'll have to find them 
yourself. The parser (i.e. grammer checker) is called "jbofihe", and the 
rough Lojban-to-English processor is called "cmafihe". I think on Debian 
Linux they are called the "lojban-tools" or something?

But Lojban is definitely worth learning! All the resources you need are 
available for free online!

Mikevdg.