On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 02:07:51PM -0700, steve vertigo wrote:
Ive been daydreaming lately... Imagining a place where all translations were maching-processed, boiled down to a trans-language file that upon every varied edit, was translated back into all other languages.... The interface language would merely be a veneer-- a window into which whatever software used makes its best guess at figuring out what it is you have to say, and converts this to a nexus form -- a tongue which uses as may components of as many languages as necessary to describe and prescribe an idea -- a language of nothing but vast quantities of metadata and dried muffin remnants...
It would be ugly, disastrous, competitive, heated.. wily, gnarly, vicious, capricious, seedy, dastardly, voluminous, voluptuous, harried, shitty, mungled, bungled, wacked in the head, screwy, cheezy, and just plain fucked up... But it still ought work. Instead of a wiki it could be called a "sickie"
Heck, who here can remember what they thought of a wiki when they first heard the idea?
Sure, nice idea, I was thinking about something like that for quite a few years now, but it doesn't seem to be actually doable.
Path 1: * find some part of human knowledge that we want to generate translations for (set of unit tests) * make some toy magic language with a generator, easiest one that will actually do the work * iteratively extend
Path 2: * describe all languages with vocabulary, grammar etc. on Wikipedias * someday someone will use that for machine translation
I'm kinda following path 2 now ;-). Any idea of good start set for path 1 ?