Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban Scholasticism

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Paul Vigo wrote:
> I understand where you are getting to with this and I agree in 
> principle. However. Many years ago, frustrated with trying to learn 
> french, I decided to read 20,000 leagues under the sea. I'd picked it up 
> at a second hand shop for a dollar. When I started I had no idea, but by 
> the time I'd read it I could read passable french. The advantage of 
> reading a long text using a single voice (writer) in their own style is 
> like any repetative excercise, after a while it starts to become easier 
> and more fluid. Though the work of an individual translator or writer 
> may be idiomatic in form (ie englishy or obtuse when compared to a 
> refference text) it acts as a great facilitator for learning, as the 
> subject and narrative elements become increasingly well known and odd 
> uses and referents can be intuited. This is not unlike how we learn 
> natural languages, and I believe the benefit of reading of long texts 
> (over example texts and drills) is often underestimated.

I agree, but ...

The percentage of the small Lojban community that actually will read 
something longer than a pageful of Lojban is small in the first place. 
So the market for even one long translation is probably in the dozens at 
most, and probably longer.

More importantly, the time spent in doing even a mediocre translation is 
several times as much as the time spent reading it and

a) the number of people who are competent to translate a given text to 
any arbitrary degree of skill is significantly smaller than the number 
who are sufficiently competent to try to read the resulting level of 
text (assuming that the results are readable at all)
b) the number of people who are both competent and willing to translate 
texts of book length in a timeframe shorter than many months or even 
years are vanishingly small
c) probably by the time you finished a mediocre translation of a novel, 
your Lojban skills would be sufficiently improved that you want to throw 
it out and start over, realizing just how bad you were when you started. 
I think Nick Nicholas suffered from this effect, even with much shorter 
translations.
d) the time that any potential translator spends on said long book takes 
time away from all other Lojbanic activities, including reading what 
others are writing, which reduces the market for the translations that 
are done and chokes the community by denying others the time spent on 
short term activities that are more interactive.  And arguably, anyone 
competent enough to translate a novel into Lojban should be being 
co-opted into the byfy work (that is my own excuse - I cannot justify 
spending my too-limited Lojban time on even a short translation while 
the byfy work is stagnating and I haven't done anything on it in a long 
time)
e) the byfy work, even if it results in only minor changes, will to some 
extent render all prior translations at best "quaint".  Not that many 
people read Athelstan's Saki, and Nick's early translations, these days, 
even though they were the best thing that existed for a long time.  They 
are probably not the best examples of Lojban these days, though they 
were at the time.  This rapid aging detracts from the motivation people 
have in spending the necessary long time on a long translation.

Put another way, while you were reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" 
in French, you probably weren't at the same time translating "Around the 
World in 80 Days" or any other similar length work into French 
(especially French that someone else would read), and probably you 
haven't tried to translate anything even a fraction as long into French 
since you finished.  And you had no reason to believe that the French 
language would evolve enough to make your translation in need of 
revision within a short time.

All this isn't to say that people who want to do translations shouldn't 
do them.  But shorter ones are probably more likely to be finished if 
you start them, and more likely to be read once finished.  And people 
shouldn't be complaining about the lack of reading material of any given 
length until they've produced something of that length so they know how 
much work goes into it.

lojbab