The Silent Number

Posted: 2009-06-15

Lojban is designed to be perfectly logical and allow for exact specificity of meaning. Why does this matter for Google? Well, it has huge potential, not only for computer applications based on the language since it's structure can be processed by computers easily, but also more prominently as an intermediate language in automatic machine translation of natural languages. Currently, Google uses English which often yeilds some funny results.

It would be incorrect for me to say that Google needs to use a language like lojban instead of English because their translations are actually pretty great. The issue is that lojban has much more potential for this purpose and English is holding them back. If lojban were used instead of English as Google's intermediate language for automatic translation, it would be much easier to extract the exact meaning of a word used in some context in one language, and translate it into another language. Instead of using a language which does not have a perfectly regular and logical structure, exact meaning, and completely unambiguous grammar, they currently rely on English which doesn't function well to preserve meaning while carrying it from one language and then into another. Lojban, on the other hand, was designed with this in mind.

This isn't to say that Lojban is perfect, or even ready to be used like that on such a large scale yet. Many terms, like computer-related technical terms have not been created yet, and the language needs further development, not to mention the lack of widespread adoption. For this reason, it would be unwise for Google to just go ahead with using lojban and unreasonable for me to request that.

Like many of my ideas, this requires a bit of an investment for the future. Something may not be entirely practical now, but adopting it to a reasonable level will payoff later. For now, it would be safe for Google to simply hire some lojbanana's to work on a lojban translation for Google Translate. If Google is worried about the language being dead and never developing or spreading, this move would get a lot of coverage and get a lot of people interested in it. If Google really wanted to, they could sponsor lojban. I doubt that would happen, but damn it would be cool!

At the very least, they could add lojban to the Google in Your Language program to allow users to translate Google services into lojban for them. We should ask them for it: translation-services@google.com