[lojban] Re: Automatic Lojban -> English translation?

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

I agree with Robin. Although a Lojban to English translator would be
easier than an English to Lojban or French to English, it would still
require an enormous amount of work -- a team of people working
full-time, with more Lojban texts than are currenty available.

However, it's quite easy to translate Lojban into a version where the
Lojban words are simply replaced by English/French/German equivalents.
That way, you have to learn Lojban grammar and (more onerously)
place-structures, but not the actual vocab. Hence although Lojban
is not a magical translational interlanguage, it could be quite effective
as a written/electronic lingua franca.

--And.

>>> pmak0 <pmak@aaanime.net> 06/20/02 07:11am >>>
--- In lojban@y..., robin <robin@B...> wrote:

> >>Since Lojban is supposed to be unambiguously parsible, would it be
> >>theoretically possible to write a computer program that parses Lojban and
> >>outputs readable English (or any other language) without loss of meaning?
>
> I'd say readable and grammatical, but not idiomatic.  We already have 
> parsers and glossers; all that is needed is something that will generate 
> the English syntax.  Even so, it would probably be a long time before we 
> had anything remotely resembling natural-sounding English.

I was thinking this:

If people make a Lojban -> English translator, and then also a Lojban -> German, -> French, -> Spanish, -> Japanese, -> every major language translator, then Lojban becomes very powerful.

Because then anyone who can write in Lojban can have it automatically machine-translated to all those target languages, and it will be understandable. I'm guessing this would be a step ahead of current machine translation (which tends to produce incomprehensible junk), if http://world.altavista.com/ is any indication of the current state-of-the-art.



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