Subject: Re: [lojban] Automatic Lojban -> English translation?

From: robin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:51:01 +0000

Björn Gohla wrote:

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>On Monday 17 June 2002 10:41, pmak0 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 do think so, i did once post about this in message 
><01121721050200.01120@linux>.
>
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. It's pretty 
easy to get a program to render "mi dunda le cukta le ninmu" as "I give 
the book to the woman", and you might even be able to, with much more 
advanced programming, get it to guess unspecified tenses with 70% 
accuracy (I wonder how current machine translation performs with 
Chinese). The problem would come with rendering stuctures which have no 
natural English equivalents - you end up with something that is 
understandable but weird, as with a lot of natural language translation 
software. OTOH, it would be pretty easy for someone to look at a 
machine-generated tranlsation and rewrite it in more idiomatic English 
(or whatever).

robin.tr

-- 
"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