Re: Universal Translation Language

At 7:19 pm -0400 27/5/99, Bryan Maloney wrote:
>On Thu, 27 May 1999, Marcos Franco wrote:
>
>> Thanks for your advice, though it's not the aim of my language to be a
>> philosophical one or so. The important thing is to keep it unambiguous
>> enough to be suitable for computer parsing and MT. Btw, this can bring
>> subsequent linguistic advantages, but as I said on my first message,
>
>Here's the thing.  Wittgenstein's corpus is very much concerned with the
>question of ambiguity, and ultimately with whether or not it is a
>universal good to eliminate ambiguity.
Indeed - in fact such a language would make some things quite
untranslatable since the effect the writer is trying to produce depends
upon a certain degree of ambiguity.  And this varies considerable from
language to language and is one of those things that cause headaches to
translators.

Indeed, I have grave doubts whether it is possible to eliminate all
ambiguity.  Classical Yiklamu has possibly the largest vocabulary of all
conlangs and was design specifically to be as unambiguous as possible as
regards lexicon.  But I suspect one skilled in its use could still be
umbiguous if s/he wished to be.

The whole matter of translation is full of pitfalls.  Another book worth
reading in this regard is George Steiner's "After Babel".  I have grave
doubts about the possibility of universal automatic MT.

However, I do wish Marcus luck with his efforts.  Be aware of the pitfalls
and even if (as frankly I suspect) you will not be successful in achieving
all you wish, you may well make some interesting discoveries along the way.

Ray.