Computerized translation into conlang?

Has anybody ever given any thought to writing a computer program to translate
English into a conlang?

I'm working on a chatbot program, and I've gotten as far as parsing and chunking
English sentences, replacing idioms with their plain-English equivalents,
separating out noun phrases, verb phrases, etc., and assigning adverbs and
adjectives to their appropriate nouns and verbs.

In other words, I now have a program that pretty successfully pulls apart an
English sentence and represents it as separate elements that could now be
reassembled in any arbitrary fashion. It would be an easy matter at this point
to reassemble the pieces using different root words, add case endings, provide
a different means of conjugating verbs, etc., and produce a "translation" of
the sentence.

The only restriction would be that of semantic categories. Pretty much the conlang
would have to map a given word onto the same semantic space of the original
English word, which would be a bit artificial. Although it might be possible to
loosen that restriction with some more semantic analysis in the program.

Anyway, just a random thought. It might be fun. It would be a way to produce a huge
volume of works in that conlang, like translating the complete works of
Shakespeare in an afternoon. :)

--gary
http://fiziwig.com/chatbot/network01.html

Replies