Hi Christoph! Christoph Spuhler wrote:
Well... theoretically, yes. Practically, not quite yet. Practically you could also use http://babelfish.altavista.com (if it still exists) to translate between languages.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.
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.