The
system I am really aiming at is a different one, and there has
been plenty of related work in this direction: imagine a wiki
where you
enter or edit content, sentence by sentence, but
the natural
language
representation is just a surface syntax for an
internal structure.
Your
editing interface is a constrained, but natural
language. Now, in
order
to
really make this fly, both the rules for the
parsers (interpreting
the
input) and the serializer (creating the output)
would need to be
editable
by the community - in addition to the content
itself. There are a
number
of
major challenges involved, but I have by now a
fair idea of how to
tackle
most of them (and I don't have the time to
detail them right now).
So what would you want to enable with this? Faster bootstrapping of
content? How would it work, and how would this be superior to an
approach like the one taken in the Translate extension (basically,
providing good interfaces for 1:1 translation, tracking differences
between documents, and offering MT and translation memory based
suggestions)? Are there examples of this approach being taken
somewhere else?
Not just bootstrapping the content. By having the primary content be
saved
in a language independent form, and always translating it on the fly,
it
would not merely bootstrap content in different languages, but it
would
mean that editors from different languages would be working on the
same
content. The texts in the different language is not a translation of
each
other, but they are all created from the same source. There would be
no
primacy of, say, English.