Subject: Lojban projects update

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 03:02:10 -0500

Just an update on what I've been doing with Lojban recently:

I've given up on the GNOME translation, based on my experience when I
actually attempted to use it. GNOME doesn't even use the same system as
other programs to figure out what language it's supposed to be in, it
seems - I couldn't even get it to use Spanish consistently. Some ugly
hacks made some things show up in Lojban, but I wouldn't honestly expect
anyone else to take the steps required.

Additionally, I discovered that GNOME was generally the wrong place to
start, because of how nebulous it is. I wanted to create a Lojban
computing environment, but there are so many things which would better
be translated first.

So I decided to go about this the right way. I registered art-lojban as
a team in the GNU translation project (I had a heck of a time
explaining to the guy that our three-letter code really is ten letters
long), and myself as the only member. If we start using this, the
translation project team would give us a way to check in Lojban
translations of common UNIX programs, and have these translations
automatically released in the package. It might even cause someone
poking around to see what files a package installed to wonder "Hmm,
what's this art-lojban thing?"

So if anyone's interested (I notice there were a couple of people making
half-hearted contributions to the GNOME file), just let me know and I'll
add you to the team. If we get three people involved we get a team
mailing list (hoo boy, another Lojban-related mailing list).

The right place to start would most likely be the locale file, which
tells the computer (for example) how to sort text in alphabetical order
in Lojban (not hard), how money, times, and dates are expressed (please
please let it be big-endian), the names of days and months... uh, what
the Lojban standard paper size is... from there, we could go on to
translate some programs. For comparison, Esperanto has translated
the Debian menu system, grep, mutt, texinfo, and xmms.

Once again, if you're interested, let me know.

And then the other thing: Deciding I need to actually write stuff in
Lojban, I decided to embark on a translation of Flatland, by Edwin
Abbott. This has the advantages that it's copyright-free, it's
relatively short, and it deals with concepts which generally are natural
to Lojban. (And maybe this will help establish things like {fa'abe'a} as
being "northward", when it becomes apparent how awkward things would be
in the story without such words.) I've translated the first few chapters
already just so I knew I really could do it before announcing it to the
list. 

I've been doing it in a mock-TexInfo format so far - I take the plain
text file and put @c before all the English lines. I should probably fix
that sometime.

Where should I put the file to make it public? Should I add it to CVS?

--
la rab.spir
noi ba ai pilno zo gumri