Todd, the following link gives a flavour of how the Australian inititiative on the introduction of Esperanto into the primary school classroom is being promoted - click here

Personally, I would be inclined to argue for Esperanto not so much as a stepping stone to other languages (there is experimental evidence), but for its educational value in its own right, using arguments not so far removed from those that were used to justify teaching Latin (when this was commmon), but with the added advantage that the language is actually spoken and needn't be confined to the brightest pupils.

Genjix, what I think you can say with some certainty is that the existence of the imagined hand-held translators is going to change the perception of language learning and attitudes to the lingua franca issue.

As Esperantists we should start thinking about this now and consider:

1. How we should change the way we argue for Esperanto.

2. How this technology might be exploited for our purposes.

That is a great little write up on the primary schools. I love it.
The problem with translators is, what if it breaks? I'm sure there will be ways to infect mobile units with bugs, viruses, and malware. Or just get it wet.
If it started giving bad grammar or made a mistake, the listener would know but the user would not. I found myself learning Esperanto faster when using the translator, because I had to fix the grammar and word endings constantly. Or choose a better word.
"Set" has 300 or more definitions. How could a translator pick the right word? The t9 predictive text in my phone made "skate park" into "slave park".
There will be generations of people who don't trust translators or predictive text choosers for this reason. Holding a faulty translator = getting laughed at.

AND...Esperanto is fun to learn and use online.

sudanglo:Todd, the following link gives a flavour of how the Australian inititiative on the introduction of Esperanto into the primary school classroom is being promoted - click here

Personally, I would be inclined to argue for Esperanto not so much as a stepping stone to other languages (there is experimental evidence), but for its educational value in its own right, using arguments not so far removed from those that were used to justify teaching Latin (when this was commmon), but with the added advantage that the language is actually spoken and needn't be confined to the brightest pupils.

That's a pretty reasonable approach, and rather Raŭmist in spirit, actually. The resemblance to the arguments for studying Latin were, rather different, as I recall. They prominently included the value of introducing pupils to classical literature, which of course no one cares about anymore.

I wouldn't expect this to have much success in the US, for reasons that I've explained elsewhere, but maybe the Australian model has a better chance in less culturally isolated places.

Have you ever heard of Project DLT (Distributed Language Translation)?. It started in the late 80s or early 90s but then stagned, I think, due to financial shortage.

Basically the system was intended to translate automatically from any of a given group of languages, into any other of the same group (as far as I know, it only reached an operative statuts between English and French). They realized that, in order to translate from any among N languages, into any other of the group, they would need N * (N-1) programs.

E.g., if the group were composed of just 10 languages, they would need 90 programs, since any of the 10 languages would need a whole translation program into any of the other 9.

But if they used a bridge language, then the number of programs would be reduced to 2N. In our example, we would need 20 programs, one from each language into the bridge language, and another one from the bridge into each language.

Needless, to say, a reduction of 78 % in the quantity of programs needed, was really tempting.

And if the languages were not 10, but 20, then the reduction would increase to 89 % (40 programs instead of 380).

The bridge language should be as unambiguous as it could be, with a grammar as simple as possible and with no exceptions. Yes, precisely the one you are thinking of. But even Esperanto had to be modified in order to be suitable, since, as any human language, it still was too ambiguous for machines. Yet it was the language which needed less adaptations.

Perhaps these new translating machines we are talking about, could use that idea.

And that would refloat a discussion we esperantists held at that moment: was this good or bad news? Esperanto was being used and studied, but it was hidden in the machines, not used directly by human beings. A good arena for debate between finalvictorians and raumists, no? (Have I accurately translated "finvenkistoj"?)

Regards,

Daniel

sudanglo:Genjix, what I think you can say with some certainty is that the existence of the imagined hand-held translators is going to change the perception of language learning and attitudes to the lingua franca issue.

As Esperantists we should start thinking about this now and consider:

1. How we should change the way we argue for Esperanto.

2. How this technology might be exploited for our purposes.

Todd, if you think that the arguments used, in the link I gave, have a rather Rauxmist flavour, then perhaps we needn't worry too much about such initiatives being opposed on Trojan Horse grounds.

The result however (obviously) of such initiatives being widely copied puts us firmly on the path to the Fina Venko.

I supose you might characterize the two camps as political engagement on the one hand and abstention (non-involvement) on the other hand. But it goes beyond this, I think, and the two philosophies seem to me to have implications for the policing and the development of the language. (Case in point - changing the meaning of 'Ne')

Incidentally, given the American attitude of 'can do', you might expect the US to be at the forefront in ingenious solutions to achieving the Finvenkista goal.

sudanglo:Todd, if you think that the arguments used, in the link I gave, have a rather Rauxmist flavour, then perhaps we needn't worry too much about such initiatives being opposed on Trojan Horse grounds.

That doesn't follow at all. We live in the Internet Age, and anyone who doesn't already know what Esperanto is, or its historical ambitions, can find out a lot in about ten minutes. As I say, I like the general approach, but that's not to say I think it would be effective.

For widespread entry into school curricula, at least here in the US, a program like this would need to pass academic scrutiny, and Esperanto simply won't. The "objections" will dwarf any alleged educational advantages. Of that I haven't the slightest doubt.

I supose you might characterize the two camps as political engagement on the one hand and abstention (non-involvement) on the other hand. But it goes beyond this, I think, and the two philosophies seem to me to have implications for the policing and the development of the language. (Case in point - changing the meaning of 'Ne')

You've lost me there. I don't see what Raŭmists or Finvenkists have to gain by changing the meaning of "Ne".

Incidentally, given the American attitude of 'can do', you might expect the US to be at the forefront in ingenious solutions to achieving the Finvenkista goal.

Even assuming that's anything more than a stereotype that Americans like to promote, you'd still have to convince all the "can do" people that the Fina Venko is a goal worth achieving. The availability of better and better machine translators will make that goal less and less plausible--and it doesn't have a lot of credibility right now.

@danielcg -- I remember when DLT was a hot topic, indeed. I wondered what happened to it.

The biggest obstacle to machine translation is that, regardless of what language is being used, there are so many sentences that require extra-linguistic knowledge simply to be parsed. The famous example is the English pair of sentences "Time flies like an arrow" and "Fruit flies like a banana." To translate those from English, you need to do more than choose words from a lexicon and massage them into a new sentence with different syntax. You have to have some idea what it all means just to get the parts of speech right.

Another example:

The Spanish phrase "niñas y mujeres embarazadas" may be translated as "pregnant girls and women" or "girls and pregnant women". Both are gramatically possible. Only with some knowledge about the extralinguistic world, one can know that the former is wrong and the latter is correct.

Regards,

Daniel

T0dd:
The biggest obstacle to machine translation is that, regardless of what language is being used, there are so many sentences that require extra-linguistic knowledge simply to be parsed. The famous example is the English pair of sentences "Time flies like an arrow" and "Fruit flies like a banana." To translate those from English, you need to do more than choose words from a lexicon and massage them into a new sentence with different syntax. You have to have some idea what it all means just to get the parts of speech right.

The famous translator and Esperantist Claude Piron wrote an article containing several examples illustrating the problems of trying to use machines for translation.

Hang on, Todd. Not so long ago it was you(Raŭmisto) who wanted to change the meaning of jes and ne.

Surely the point is anyway, that with a little ingenuity any Trojan Horse or other objections can be dealt with by repackaging/rebranding Esperanto.

The beauty of campaigning for Esperanto in the schools on purely educational grounds is that it sidesteps all the standard arguments against Esperanto.

It may be a little Machiavellian to tell the world, don't worry about us Esperantists, we have given up our ambitions, we are all Raŭmistoj now - but if it leads to a Fina Venko result, could be smart move.

Incidentally, my impression of academics, with regard to Esperanto is that many of them have been quite ready to argue against Esperanto, without knowing the facts, and might not feel it at all necessary to put in 10 minutes of research on the Internet.

Acdemic scrutiny might be a rather flattering term in their case.

Now, didn't a certain party not long ago say - I'm a philospher I don't need no stinking evidence.

The practical issue in relation to the imagined pocket translators is not that there are in principle certain difficult sentences (like your example with flies), but how common these are, or more specifically how many cases there would be where the context or collocation doesn't give a clue to the correct parsing.

In the example you give, I imagine that it might not be such a problem since the translator would have in its databank an translation for fruit flies as a noun phrase, and not have a translation of time flies as an NP. This would force it to prefer the correct parsing.