Re: VL-TRANS: Caution:
Adam Ophir Shapira 
Tue, 21 Oct 1997 19:58:38 +0100

At 8:53 AM -0500 10/21/97, Rob Zook wrote:
>At 09:46 PM 10/20/97 +0100, Adam wrote:
>>Oh, so you haven't heard of John F. Kennedy's famous attempt
>>to speak German with English grammar?
>>
>>My point in saying that overusing stuff like the Universal
>>Translator Assistant could cause you to say things that are
>>not only choppy in the target language ... but that could
>>actually mean things *very different* from what you intend.
>
>No I just don't see the relavance to anything said here? What
>were you replying to?

The purpose of this post was to caution people against
over-using the Vulcan Language Universal Translator
Assistant. It is a nice piece of programming, but aside
from that, but let's not over-estimate. The ability to
translate entire languages is insignificant compared to
the powers of the Force. :-)

What prompted this actually is that a few times I posted
things on Vulcan-l hoping that someone who knows Vulcan
would translate them, so that I could work on making it
possible to actually learn to speak the language. I made
it very clear in those posts that the translations *needed*
to be gramatically correct for this to work.

But what did I get? Two things. First, I got pointers to the
Vulcan Languate Universal Translator Assistant. Second, I got
translations that were generated by that program. Quite frankly,
that is over-using the program. It can be used at most as an
emergency measure of last-resort when trying to communicate
with someone who understands that you're using this limited
technology. In trying to translate things so that someone can
drill on them to learn the language, you need a sentient being
who knows both languages reasonably well to do the translating.