Message-ID: <510E2B73.9070803@lojban.org>
Date: Sun, 03 Feb 2013 04:18:43 -0500
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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To: Benjamin <misterhamin@gmail.com>
CC: "Logical Language Group, Inc." <lojban@lojban.org>
Subject: Re: Lojban Translation
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Benjamin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I read about Lojban in an article, and as a computer scientist, I was immediately interested in its potential for Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to start writing some simple programs where the computer uses Lojban for processing data, but the user still has all interactions with the computer in English. In short, I was looking for a English-Lojban (and vice versa) translation service/software to enable the computer to not have to deal with English, and the user not have to learn Lojban. Is there software/a service that you could suggest that can translate English to Lojban and Lojban to English, but can handle complete sentences/phrases? I have stumbled across a few translators on other sites that can handle only single words, but they are not very helpful because then I would have to create/find a separate engine to compile the word translations into the complete translated phrase.

The short answer is "no".

There have been some attempts to create glossers that will go from 
Lojban to English.  These create not-necessarily-grammatical English 
that someone can use as an aid to understanding the Lojban, but it 
probably isn't anywhere near as good as, say "Google Translate".

Going from English to Lojban, I think, people are still at the 
conceptual level.  English idiom is way beyond anything we can analyze 
algorithmically, and then there is the polysemy (multiple unrelated 
meanings) of words.

We have computer scientists who like to work on that sort of project, 
but it is all hobbyist/volunteer work, and therefore goes in fits and 
starts.  One local guy is doing stuff with WordNet to try to establish a 
framework for machine translation, but he needs competent help.  Others 
are working on other projects and I don't keep up with what everyone is 
doing myself, since it is outside of my technical competence these days.

The best bet to get more details would be to ask on the main Lojban List 
(on Google groups) or on IRC (channel "Lojban")

lojbab
-- 
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.