Solresol Translator

[Dan Parson]

I'm a web developer, so I had the idea of possibly coding a translator
for Solresol. This may be a question with an obvious answer, but would
any others be interested in such a tool? I've looked around, and only
seen a Visual Basic translator with a limited dictionary and
functionality. I know that very few if any of us here are fluent in
Solresol, so perhaps it would be easier to use a translator than
searching through the huge spreadsheets (of course big thanks to
Garrison). And Garrison, would you be fine with me using the data from
those spreadsheets? I would of course credit you, and regularly update
the data from the spreadsheets here.

This translator would be web-based and hosted on my website, so it
would be accessible from any computer. My initial plan would be to
have a basic direct translation, basically meaning lookup and replace
from the dictionary. I would then move to recognizing tense,
plurality, and other elements of Solresol that require minor
modifications to handle. At this point, I would modify the translator
to actually recognize the syntax of Solresol, and be able to translate
whole sentences. Seeing as how Google Translate is sketchy at best, I
don't expect achieving perfect translation, but I think I could get it
to understandable quality.

The actual features would be quite the fun part. The translator would
initially only support the original syllables, but most other forms
(abbreviated, colors, numbers) would be relatively easy to add soon
afterward. Music notes would be a bit tougher, but I could probably
use MusicXML to display the notes as an image. Glyphs would probably
be most challenging, if only for coding the rules of connecting them.
Of course, the translator could also be used to "translate" between
the different forms of Solresol, so that feature would be quite useful
on its own!

I think this could not only be useful to speakers of Solresol, but it
could also be an introduction to Solresol for others. I know Garrison
doesn't want himself to seem too authoritative, but someone needs to
have a leadership role for an effort this big, and I think Garrison
has filled the role well so far.

So, comments, questions, concerns?

[Travis Mckenzie]

All I can think of to say is: Awesome!

That would be amazing!

Can I ask right from the outset, that if this works as you say, would you mind If I linked to the translator from my blog, or future website about the world of my novel? I'd love to have a section where people can put in a spell and have the language of magic shown to them. I would credit everything to you and Garrison of course, I just think this would be awesome.

No problems if you have an issue with such a tool being used for a fictional world, I fully understand that my use of solresol is not necessarily the name as yours.

I seriously am a little stupefied by how some people can look at a problem like coding a solresol translator, and think,' yeah, I can do that' To me, that is as close to magic as we will ever get.

Carry on.

Travis.

--
Here is the copy of my soul I uploaded to google. Come and say hello. It is fully interactive.

[Garrison Osteen]

That sounds great! Go for it! That's what the spreadsheet is for :) Searching it is more difficult than it should be; a translator would be best.

Thanks for the compliment, I hope I'm doing a good job :)

Good luck!

- Garrison

[Dan Parson]

Well, from making a page for the translator, and making another
Solresol-related webpage for my own use, I ended up putting it all
into a small website. The page for my own use was a list of all the
Solresol resources I've found, with a description for each, so they'd
be more organized and easy to tell what they were than browser
bookmarks. I decided I should make an up-to-date page like mine
available to the public, since other similar collections are outdated.
Since I wanted to make this list and the future translator public, it
made sense to bundle it into a website. It's nothing fancy, but I only
put together in the last day, and I don't aim for it to look really
extravagant. So without further ado, I present:

Sidosi ("learn" in Solresol) - http://sidosi.danielparson.com

Now to get more directly on-topic, I posted my "official" roadmap for
the translator on the site, so you guys know relatively what to expect
when. I haven't actually started coding the translator, mostly because
I got distracted making this site, but also because I need to compile
the databases into a machine-readable format first. I'll probably have
the first "beta" available in the next few days. Like the roadmap
says, it'll be really rough (no gender, tense, or plurality
recognition), but it'll be a start!

To answer your question, Travis, the translator will be free to use
for any purpose, as long as you or anyone else isn't trying to charge
for "access" to the translator or intentionally trying to overload it
(DoS attack). I thought about the possibility of making an embeddable
translator, but I'll have to see how the translator works with glyph
and music note entry before I can try to make it embeddable. If you
want to link to the page, no attribution is required, since the page
itself will credit Garrison and me, but of course it's always
appreciated!

So, any more comments, questions, concerns, or ideas about the
translator or website? Are there any errors to correct or additions to
make to the Resources list? Is there anything I should add to the
website?

On Aug 8, 12:19 pm, Garrison Osteen <garost...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That sounds great! Go for it! That's what the spreadsheet is for :)
> Searching it is more difficult than it should be; a translator would be
> best.
> Thanks for the compliment, I hope I'm doing a good job :)
> Good luck!
> - Garrison
>

> > Here is the copy of my soul<https://plus.google.com/118322540649975202026/about>I uploaded to google. Come and say hello. It is fully interactive.

[M O]

Concerns here :)

 

I think a simple input-output online dictionary would be okay at this point (i.e. you enter a word in English/French and it gives you the corresponding Solresol word), although I'm not sure anyone's checked Gar's work completely. Not to dis/doubt Gar's ability; it's just we're all human and make mistakes :) I've started, but haven't finished.

 

But I think it’d be jumping the gun to create an online translator at this point. The Solresol community is young (essentially us) and the ins and outs of the grammar are still being/yet to be teased out. So, I’d rather see some examples of good Solresol out on the web first - respecting its grammar, that it is a separate language with its own way of expressing things - than tons of bad examples of ungrammatical Solresol. Because, really, other people starting out would be none the wiser when coming across the machine-generated Solresol and might end up imitating English written with Solresol words. If you have the server space, a forum would be great though…

[Garrison Osteen]

Actually, that's a good point. I haven't even checked my work completely, or even incompletely for that matter :)

I'm sure that in 2660 words I made more than a couple mistakes (like leaving out the word "ear").

On further reflection, I would say I agree with M... It would be good to get things together more. And a forum would be wonderful, obviously, if we could ever get that together.

I really like your list of links - it's all stuff that I have filed away randomly somewhere (and often saved to word documents in the paranoid fear that everything will disappear). It's nice to see it all laid out logically :)

[Garrison]

(But the word-for-word translation that would make it easier to find things would still be great, because as I said, the spreadsheet takes time to search)

[Travis Mckenzie]

I agree. The translator can improve over time, but it will aid in its own creation.

[Travis Mckenzie]

Also, I was reading some of the linked documents on your site, and I saw reference to the idea that solresol can be depicted as notes on a staff. 

Can you explain this? I like the idea, and am thinking of using it in my book. The Wizards have staffs you see, and I like the idea that their ends are encircled with lines and where they are touched can determine the writing of spells. This would make it a spell casting tool, not just a ethereal stick of wood that magic comes out of willy nilly.

Travis.

[Dan Parson]

I totally agree with all your points. That's why I put "intelligent
translation" last, and as my highest "time and effort" rating. I don't
think Solresol is currently in a condition to be reliably understood
by a computer, and the only thing that will help that is a growing
community of speakers and contributors. I think with enough time, we
could raise it to that level, but I don't mean for it to sound like
it'll happen soon (I'll edit the roadmap to make that clear).
Dictionary translation will be the main priority until Solresol is
more developed. My intention for the translator is to allow easy
lookup of particular words and phrases, certainly not for anyone to
learn the language from it. When it's launched, the page will say
that, and have a disclaimer of accuracy.

With the obvious support for a forum, I'll get to work on one, and
start a separate discussion on its structure, backend, etc. since it's
not really related to the translator.

About the music note form, it appears the official system is depicted
in Gajewsi's book with this image: http://mozai.com/writing/not_mine/solresol/portee.gif
. It uses three lines, and each note is written, left-to-right, on the
line or space specified. I put together a few quick examples here:
http://sidosi.danielparson.com/img/music_note_solresol.png . A couple
of images using a 5-line staff are on the Wikipedia page for Solresol,
but I'm pretty sure they don't match Sudre's and Gajewski's original
words. There is also no stated way to separate words, specify double
syllables, or specify accents. Word separation is the big one, though
I suppose an obvious gap would work. I suppose double syllables could
just be written out fully. I think there was a discussion about simply
not specifying accents in the music note form (and glyph form). All of
this is assuming Sudre didn't give any additional information in his
book, because I haven't looked through his book yet.

[Travis Mckenzie]

Ahh thanks, I see it is just the music notation... I am not a musical man, and so did not know that the lines were referred to as staffs.

[Garrison]

That sounds good, Dan. You know what you're doing :)

You could certainly still put a musical staff on your wizard staffs for magic doing, Travis; I think it's a rather clever pun :)

[Travis Mckenzie]

Yeah, i think I will. It is a cool idea, and makes the staffs (Staves? plural?) more realistic.

Also, can I confirm that we definitely use "si" and not "ti" even though it is mentioned a few places that "ti" is more modern, and at least in my mind, better?

Travis.

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Garrison <garo...@gmail.com> wrote:

That sounds good, Dan. You know what you're doing :)

You could certainly still put a musical staff on your wizard staffs for magic doing, Travis; I think it's a rather clever pun :)

--
Here is the copy of my soul I uploaded to google. Come and say hello. It is fully interactive.

[Garrison Osteen]

I hadn't even thought of asking that... I'm pretty sure we're definitely using 'si'. It's the way the language was created, and it seems wrong to change it (to me). Plus, "si" means "yes", which is obviously a relation to certain natural languages. And then we have words like "Dosido" which make me smile :)

Anyone disagree?

(oh, and I think it's staves, yes. I'm not sure if music staves were also like that or not though. Probably they are.)

[Dan Parson]

So, I started work on the translator yesterday (Aug. 11), and I
quickly got distracted with a side project. The translator will
convert words between forms of Solresol by breaking the word into
syllables, then substituting the appropriate representation in the
form (solresol -> sol-re-sol -> 5-2-5 -> 525). Anyway, I played around
with that method, and I used it to generate "supposed-to-be" opposites
of words. It goes through each word in Garrison's table, output the
original word and its English translation, generate the word's
opposite, then look up and output the opposite and its definition.
It's quite interesting looking at opposite pairs that we don't usually
think of as opposites, but still work. Of course, not every pair is an
opposite pair, but I thought it'd be a neat resource to have. This is
a static output of the script, since having it process the entire
database on each page load would tax the server unnecessarily.

Solresol "Supposed-to-be" Opposites: http://sidosi.danielparson.com/resource/solresol_opposites.html


Also, just as a note, I changed the URL for the above music note
examples to http://sidosi.danielparson.com/resource/music_note_solresol.png

[Garrison Osteen]

Wow, that's really useful! I had thought it'd be nice to create a list of all the opposite words for ease of learning, and picking them out of a table like that is so much easier than looking them up individually. It's cool to see that spreadsheet being put to good use :)

It really is cool to see them listed, because I wasn't aware of so many of them (infinity and limit, eternal and temporary, believe and doubt, philanthropy and misanthropy, etc etc.) 

Excellent work! :D