Re: banli pu'u fanva

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 11:26 AM 02/24/2000 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>From: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
>
>"Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" wrote:
>
> > [T]he people running the project are not going to want
> > half-baked translations which is the best that any Lojbanist could do at
> > this point.
>
>Why should they care?  Are bad translations going to damage the 
>Lojban-speaking
>market for the product?  Hardly.

True.  On the other hand, low quality Lojban permanently enshrined in a 
visible place might tend to set a standard for the language that we would 
regret.  Just as Esperantists might not like to see a version in their 
language translated by someone who had only completed the 10 lesson postal 
course and who made up words for those he could not find in his 
dictionary.  Unfortunately, even the best of us is not all that much better 
than postal course graduate in Lojban skill.

I like at the lujvo that the TLI group is stuck with because of bad 
decisions by JCB. TLI has not baselined their language, but (so far as we 
know) their lexicon has been frozen in concrete in terms of bad tanru. (Of 
course we don't know this, since we don't have the dictionary, but I would 
be mildly surprised if "man-do" for "manning a ship" was 
changed.  Certainly Lognet has never announced any paring or replacement of 
bad metaphors.)

I like to see Lojban get used as much as possible, but I worry about bad 
Lojban somehow becoming a standard before we have large numbers who use 
good Lojban.  But then it is my job to worry.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)