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Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban Scholasticism



Matt Arnold wrote:
On 5/9/06, Paul Vigo <paulvigo@gmail.com> wrote:

If someone with more skills than  me wanted to attack any of the cc
licensed texts online then at least we may have something longer than
aesops fables to read. Cory Doctorow has a few books available. hmmm.


I'm one of Cory's biggest fans. In fact I invited him to be Guest of
Honor at a convention I helped to run in 2005. His works are some of
my favorites. But I hesitate to translate them into Lojban. They're
too long and they contain a lot of jargon and neologisms for which
there does not exist Lojban vocabulary.

I think that is part of the problem. People want to jump from Aesop's fables, which are a paragraph long, without a standard text so that people feel more free to take liberties with the wording, and then jump to novels of great length, often loaded with the sorts of odd uses of language that would tend to attract Lojbanists (no insult intended to the Alice translators).

Athelstan was wise in tackling a Saki short story 16 years ago. There are plenty of these, they are only a few pages long so they can be translated much more quickly than a novel, and they are short enough that a lot of relatively novice Lojbanists would be inclined to try to read the text (I don't expect that there will be much market for the Lojban translations of "War and Peace" or "Les Miserables" for a good while).

lojbab