Subject: Re: [lojban] sibdo be la lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 16:25:43 -0500

At 09:45 PM 02/14/2001 +0100, Bjoern Gohla wrote:
>well, i had that same idea, and tried to translate headlines from the
>economist. intended more as an excercise, i could image doing more
>comprehensive news reporting eventually, once i am fluent enough.
>
> >In particular, the KDE project (argh I don't want to start any sort
> >of desktop flamewar) has very nice tools which can be used to translate
> >KDE programs into other languages. I've started on converting the
> >basic portions of KDE into Lojban, but many of the more complex sentences
> >elude me. If we could get far enough with the translation, it would
> >most probably be accepted into the KDE official distribution, giving
> >Lojban another avenue of advertisement. (*cough* Someone is translating
> >KDE into Esperanto. ;)
>
>i would much appreciate having that
>
>keeping the above in mind, i may note that what could be called "content
>centric language acquisition" seems to be pretty efficient. a major component
>of which i hold to be dealing with texts of foreign language but familiar
>content, just knowing the basics of the language and rarely referring to a
>dictionary. looking back at it, i believe this is what boosted my english in
>8th grade when i started reading computer books and began watching cnn.
>on a marginal note, children learn their native language in a similar way,
>since they do not know any language other than the one they are just
>learning, they have to work out everything from observation and imitation. i
>do not want to seem being all too knowldgeable about language acquisition,
>but having more familiar-content-every-day-use-up-to-date-lojban-texts around
>would certainly be helpful.

The problem with that of course is our old bugaboo "copyright laws". Most 
of the stuff that people would find familiar is under copyright, and 
negotiating permissions usually costs money and often is bureaucratically 
difficult (takes lots of time and you need to know who to contact). As a 
result, when people try to do translations, they usually are short snippets 
that might pass for "fair use" (like the LOTR sample being discussed now) 
or they are old works that are out of copyright.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org