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

From: "Newton, Philip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 07:22:20 +0200

And Rosta wrote:
> I haven't used jbofi'e, but I'll take your word for it. What 
> does jbofi'e do with cmavo?

Depends; it generally seems fairly smart about it. For example, terminators
such as ke and kei and so are generally left untranslated; things such as
"le mi cukta" turn into "le 'the' mi cukta 'book(s) [of] I,me'". Things such
as "be" are also generally left out. Attidunals are translated in curly
brackets e.g. ".ui '{happiness..}'". Some cmavo expand into phrases such as
"next utterance" (for di'e).

In short, it handles different cmavo in different ways.

> Ideally, my preference would be for the commonest cmavo to be
> untranslated, and the rarer cmavo to be translated and tagged
> with their selmaho.

But it doesn't attach selma'o.

Try it out at http://www.epita.fr/~poss_r/lojban/jboski.html by feeding it a
sentence you're curious about. The normal output is (IMO) more legible; it
uses HTML to colorise things (e.g. place values are red-brown, Lojban is
black and bold, English is blue and italics). If you specify "lunbe", you
get the output you'd get with the command-line version -- four lines for
each line (Lojban, English, place values, bracket numbers).

Ah yes, it puts brackets ( [ < << >> > ] ) around things to group them, and
puts numbers under them to help you match up opening and closing brackets
(and also so you it refer to them later in the gloss, e.g. "referent of #27"
or whatever).

> you wouldn't actually have to memorize the vocab. But you would have
> to know the grammar, and the semantics of the cmavo.

True. I do make use of the ma'oste occasionally to help me figure out a bit
of jbofi'e output. But you can get part of the way without knowing cmavo
IMO, though you'd still need to know rudiments of grammar to figure out what
things such as "the event(s) of I,me [is, does] go-ing the trading place(s)"
mean; if you don't know the lenu construction, "the event of XXX-ing" may
not help much, either.

mu'omi'e filip.
[email copies appreciated]
-- 
Philip Newton <[email-masked]>
All opinions are my own, not my employer's.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.