From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Thu Jun 20 05:05:57 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_2); 20 Jun 2002 12:05:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 70107 invoked from network); 20 Jun 2002 12:05:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m11.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 20 Jun 2002 12:05:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO com1.uclan.ac.uk) (193.61.255.3) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 20 Jun 2002 12:05:56 -0000 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer); Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:36:13 +0100 Received: from DI1-Message_Server by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:06:42 +0100 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.2 Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:06:15 +0100 To: pmak , lojban Subject: [lojban] Re: Automatic Lojban -> English translation? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline From: And Rosta X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810630 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin I agree with Robin. Although a Lojban to English translator would be easier than an English to Lojban or French to English, it would still require an enormous amount of work -- a team of people working full-time, with more Lojban texts than are currenty available. However, it's quite easy to translate Lojban into a version where the Lojban words are simply replaced by English/French/German equivalents. That way, you have to learn Lojban grammar and (more onerously) place-structures, but not the actual vocab. Hence although Lojban is not a magical translational interlanguage, it could be quite effective as a written/electronic lingua franca. --And. >>> pmak0 06/20/02 07:11am >>> --- In lojban@y..., robin wrote: > >>Since Lojban is supposed to be unambiguously parsible, would it be > >>theoretically possible to write a computer program that parses Lojban a= nd > >>outputs readable English (or any other language) without loss of meanin= g? > > I'd say readable and grammatical, but not idiomatic. We already have=20 > parsers and glossers; all that is needed is something that will generate= =20 > the English syntax. Even so, it would probably be a long time before we= =20 > had anything remotely resembling natural-sounding English. I was thinking this: If people make a Lojban -> English translator, and then also a Lojban -> Ge= rman, -> French, -> Spanish, -> Japanese, -> every major language translato= r, then Lojban becomes very powerful. Because then anyone who can write in Lojban can have it automatically machi= ne-translated to all those target languages, and it will be understandable.= I'm guessing this would be a step ahead of current machine translation (wh= ich tends to produce incomprehensible junk), if http://world.altavista.com/= is any indication of the current state-of-the-art. To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com=20 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/=20