The Future of SiLo's Language Library 38
i4u writes "Early this morning I had a chance to speak with Ase (pronounced 'Ace') Deliri, curator of SiLo, the world's first digital language library. At its core, SiLo is a mash of Wikipedia and Babelfish, an open database focused on facilitating real conversations with real people. 'If you have 800-1200 words in your vocabulary, you can carry on a daily conversation. That is what we are looking at. How do you get a conversation going?'"
Re:phrase book (Score:4, Informative)
This has been tried. I believe that many early (crap) machine translation systems were based on that. Apparently it doesn't work. The super-language devolves into a database of one-to-one exceptions so quickly, that you might as well treat each language pair separately.
(In the same way that human-readable programming languages always end up as just plain programming languages.)