Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 12:32:59 +0200

Robert LeChevalier:
> >Not so far from linguistic and rather recently published is the CCL : at
> >least here is a recent book whose copyright problems could surely be
> >dealt with :-)
> CLL I presume you mean. Certainly it would be easier to translate Cowan's
> prose into Lojban than that of most philosophers, and I think it would be
> a lot easier than the Lojban-only dictionary

Actually I was not thinking of a litteral translation of Cowan's work
but more of a lojban grammar written from scratch in Lojban, using CLL
as a basis.

> >More seriously, IMHO there is nothing like a well-written grammar book in
> >the very language it describes to motivate and help a devoted student.
> I dunno. I would mostly be motivated to read something in Lojban that was
> not easily locatable in English. Something written in Lojban, with the
> current level of skill of most writers, would be as likely to confuse as
> to enlighten.
> >Besides, many will see it as a kind of indirect proof of that language
> >expressive possibilities.
> I should think that we've proven that a long time ago. The problem is not
> expressivity, but skill of the expressor and understandability on the part
> of the unskilled reader

If you say that some things could be expressed in lojban but nobody has
enough skill to say it or to understand it properly, most non-lojbanists
and some lojbanists as well may conclude that the language has serious
design flaws: the difficulty to use or understand a foreign language, and
especially a conlang, is often seen, even wrongly, as a decoy to hide
poor expressive power.

I don't think you could prove anything about the expressivness of a language
with no community using it in daily life but by looking at the corpus
written in it. IMHO for lojban, a partial proof, and a rather recent one,
lies in Alice translation.
I also would like to read something not easily locatable in a language I can
read, but I want also to trust the translation to be a not a too far image
of the original work. A lojban grammar written in lojban is the first step
to that trust: at least I know the language can express clearly something
most would consider simpler than any good litterary work. Of course
the skill of the translator is then crucial, but at least I would feel it
can be done.

And then, to understand the translation properly, I do need a good
reference grammar work, and here 'good' strongly includes 'non-ambiguous'
and independent of the subtilities of english, that even natives do not
always agree on (just read some threads of discussion on the interpretation
of some glosses of Cowan's work :-)...don't you think then that lojban is
the most suited language to be used there?

> especially since Lojban more than other artificial
> languages tends to attract people who are not necessarily all that skilled
> at learning or speaking foreign languages.

I do not buy that one: all the people I read on that list have much more
language or linguistic sensibilities than the average. I would say that for
that kind of people, as for most educated people, skill is not really the
problem to learn a foreign language: motivation and time (often linked
with motivation) are the keys.

> If we can explain it in English, we can explain it in Lojban. But would
> anyone bother to understand when they can read and understand it more
> easily in English.

I am convinced that even for an english native, a well-written technical
lojban text will be less subject to intrepretations than the same in
english, considering the complexity of English and its variants.
And then, the interpretations and discussions of a lojban text
ambiguities will undoubtly benefit much more the whole lojban community
than the interpretations and discussions of the same text ambiguities
in english.

BTW, maybe we should change the thread title, should this discussion go on:
we are now far from Le Petit Prince :-)

mu'omi'e lioNEL