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

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:56:00 -0500 (EST)

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, PILCH Hartmut wrote:

> > On a related note, I can imagine a fairly simple program that exposes a
> > series of dynamic gui components that enable a non-Lojban user to express
> > themselves in Lojban. It could use dictionary synonym lookups for the main
> > selbri which pop up controls for the filling of the sumti places, drop
> > down menus listing all the abstractions available...with an hour's
> > practice, the le naljboka'e could quickly write grammatical Lojban.
>
> It is what the UNL (Unified Network Language) people are providing (or
> promising to provide). It is really a secondary problem solution. The
> primary problem is on the ll2en side: "Provided I have a text written in
> LL by a very proficient LL speaker, can the automatic translations reach
> such a level of quality that at least a careful reader will be able to
> understand them 100% correctly (even if the style is not optimal)?"

Since one of the hurdles is the year or so (optimistic estimate?) it takes
to become proficient in Lojban, the certainty of our ability to write
software that lets people write it with a day's training instead, is a
majorly important deal!

> > Good question. I can't answer until the code is written. Take a look at
> > the English output from jbofi'e/cmafi'e.
>
> Where can they be looked at?
> I would assume that this output is not yet the ultimate achievable level.

You can play with it here:
http://www.epita.fr/~poss_r/lojban/jboski.html

I say the English isn't yet quite at the level of Babelfish. It's more
like a word-for-word; a non-Englishistic word order of the Lojban would
destroy the output. The first part of this project is to write a
pre-processor that rearranges the Lojban to an Englishistic word order.

Next, the English glosses must be context-dependent.

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