I see the effort at
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/cvsweb/lojban/translations/drbible/
to translate the Bible. Good luck. I'll see you at the next apocalypse
:-).
Winning over several hundred million english speaking christians might be
worth the years it would take to translate the bible to lojban, but a more
`profitable' endeavour might be to translate the 81 `chapters' (more like
short poems) of the Tao Te Ching to win over a billion Chinese. After
all, if it is a truly graceful language, then it should be able to
describe the way of all things gracefully too.
A free (GPLed) English translation of the Tao Te Ching is at:
http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html
There are some challenging terms to translate; perhaps someone has already
had some thoughts on these:
yin - translates to any yin concept; empty, without, soft, female, black
yang - full, with, hard, male, white
tao - often translated as (the) `way' (tadji ? Plain dadjo?)
pu'u - the block of uncarved wood (c.f. Child-like mind)
ch'i - life force
Chinese certainly has some interesting huffman coding in their language.
Here is chapter 1:
The Way (Tao) that can be experienced is not (the) true (Tao);
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Way (Tao) manifests all that happens and may happen (to infinity);
The world represents all that exists and may exist.
To experience without intention is to sense the world;
To experience with intention is to anticipate the world.
These two experiences are indistinguishable;
Their construction differs but their effect is the same.
Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way (Tao),
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.
I don't know if anyone's heard of Perl golf. In Standard golf, you play a
game with a stick knocking a little white ball around in as few strokes as
possible. Of course, we all know that. In Perl golf, you play to write a
program that performs a functional description in as few keystrokes as
possible.
So, in lojban golf - you try to express as much of the message as
semantically possible, in as few words as possible, using as few
grammatical constructs as possible.
Fore!