Subject: Software Translation of Lojban (was: Re: [lojban] eurolinux proposing lojban for community patent

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 16:05:09 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, PILCH Hartmut wrote:

> We are not trying to prove that humans can write lojban, but that
> a well written lojban text can be auto-translated to something
> understandable, like Logician's English/Greek/Finnish etc.
>
> Since many promises concerning auto-translation have been broken in the
> past, it is important to assess this possibility very objectively and
> to let people understand that translating from a logical language is
> really different from translating from a normal language.

I am not sure that anybody would be convinced with a theoretical argument
without any software to back it up. I should think we would need to at
least have software that creates English from Lojban, with the result
being English of a higher quality than what AltaVista Babelfish produces.

Every now and then I suggest that this is actually a very important
project for the jbocecmu, because it would prove that Lojban is a feasible
interlingua with computer translation. But since I don't know anything
about comp linguistics, I am not the one to spearhead this; all I can do
it wave the pom-poms.

Nick Nicholas thinks that the result of computer translation of Lojban to
a Natural Language would still require a pass by a human, so it wouldn't
save any money compared to what they do now, which is to use software to
get a babelfish-quality result and have humans go over it. In my abject
ignorance I think we could do better with Lojban.

-- 
The tao that can be tar(1)ed
is not the entire Tao.
The path that can be specified
is not the Full Path.