Re: EU patent system lobbying next month

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

At 04:42 PM 12/4/99 +0200, Robin Turner wrote:
>If it's beyond Jorge's capacities, it's probably beyond anyone's
>;-)

I would never demean Jorge for his attempts to use Lojban, but we can 
always sic Nick Nicholas on it. Nick is the only one who has ever tried to 
use MEX to translate mathematical text in a technical work (he made 
mistakes, but then he had only been using the language for a couple months 
when he tried).

> However, I think it would be good ammunition to provide
>versions of a particularly ambiguous part of a patent claim -
>even just one or two sentences - in the original, in an English
>translation, and in Lojban, with a commentary on the ambiguities
>involved. Good opportunities would be provided by ambiguities in
>parsing, connectives (e.g. OR vs XOR, IF vs. IFF) or reference
>(e.g. who or what does "they" refer to?).
>
>Given that Pilch isn't so sure of his Lojban, why doesn't he post
>a short example in English to the list (pointing out how
>ambiguities should be resolved) then any interested party can
>have a go at a Lojban translation.

This is indeed the sort of thing that we need, ESPECIALLY if he can point 
out the language issues that made the translation hard. That may take 
giving us a short piece of Japanese (or German), and then telling us the 
limitations of translating it various ways into English, from the 
standpoint of patent law. To argue this case, you need to be able to 
explain why the existing solution fails as well as why the proposed 
alternative is better.

lojbab
----
lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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