Re: About making a translator

Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wrote:
> Do any of you know how to make a translator for usage on the computer?
> The only computer language I know is mIRC scripting and I don't even
> know enough of that language to make a translator that can translate
> effectively with correct grammar.
This is a highly non-trivial task.  You can get a computer to do
reasonable glosses/interlinears, but natural language is very difficult.
  Unless your lang has a very close correspondence to English (or
whichever your destination lang is, since you may be making a family of
conlangs) then translations will still look terrible.

OTOH, learning to program is a useful skill, even if it only gives you a
new way to think about grammar for conlanging.  Python
<http://www.python.org/> would likely be a good place to start, though
(depending on your age) you could also take a Comp Sci course at
university.  There is a possibility that there exists somewhere a
programming language (or a library of code) specifically for writing
translators, but it is difficult to search for such a thing, as
"translator" is also a more general programming term.

Once you (or anyone else) have a bit of programming skill (after several
years), then you could try writing a BNF notation or some form of
mathematical-ish specification for your language(s) (easier than for
natlangs, since it doesn't have the idiom and general irregularity that
natlangs tend to acquire).  This could eventually be made into a large
data file that a translating program reads in.  I'm really not sure
where to go from there, other than just "write the program".  Wikipedia
has a article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation>.

Finally, several free translation sites are linked to from
<http://babelfish.org/>.
--
Simon Richard Clarkstone
s.r.cl*rkst*n*@durham.ac.uk / s*m*n_cl*rkst*n*@hotmail.com