tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 13 07:19:30 1995
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Re: Is there a Klingon-Program?
>Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 13:35:35 -0800
>From: [email protected] (Leys)
>Hello,
>I'm new here on the list and I have a question. Are there any programs who
>can translate complete texts in Klingon to English? I already have a program
>that translates Klingon Words to English.
If you mean one that translates texts *correctly* between Klingon and
English, I wouldn't look for one, not for some decades at least. Last I
heard, humans have just barely managed to teach computers to translate
between similar languages like English and Spanish or French, and even then
the results aren't really all that great, but still need to be gone over
and checked by people. And you only get tolerable results when you start
with fairly staid and well-defined texts like technical instruction manuals
and the like. And those are translation projects with practical
applications, that have huge budgets and governments and big businesses
backing them! Klingon translation has no such utility or finances, and
Klingon moreover is much more different from English than French or Spanish
is.
Translating texts is a *very* difficult problem. That's what keeps
linguists in business. Languages are inordinately complicated (I've heard
it said that language is *the* most complicated thing human beings
do... and I believe it!) and translating a sentence is *far* more than
looking up words.
If you're interested in machine-translation of texts, you'll do much better
looking for English-French results. I hear there are already some
commercial programs on the market (the ones that are worth anything are
very expensive, though). If you're interested in generating Klingon text,
your best bet is learning Klingon. Translation requires something more
complicated than modern computers and software can supply: a human mind.
~mark