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Re: [lojban] Re: Automatic Lojban -> English translation?
And Rosta wrote:
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.
So basically a basic Lojban translator could be done if someone comes up
with a years' salary for a Lojban-fluent programmer!
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.
This would be do-able - basically just a matter of combining the parser
and the glosser. I don't think much Lojban knowledge would be required
to understanfd the output.
Hence although Lojban
is not a magical translational interlanguage, it could be quite effective
as a written/electronic lingua franca.
.ie
robin.tr
--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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--
"It suits the poet himself to be dutifully chaste,
his verses not necessarily so at all" - Catullus
Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Üniversitesi
Ankara 06533
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin