The Future of SiLo's Language Library

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?'"

phrase book

[currently_awake]

I think the secret to a universal translator is to have a single perfectly defined artificial language and then to work out how to convert your desired language into that. Because all the translator work is targeting a single fixed target you only have to translate each language once instead of English to Spanish, English to french, English to Arabic, french to English, french to Spanish, french to etc. When converting into your chosen language you also need to track what you know. Some languages have gender to words, some give the married status of women etc but others don't so that will be missing. You'll have to alter/mark the translations to declare when some aspect of the target language isn't known. The common language would be incredibly complex (superset of all languages), but since nobody would use it directly that wouldn't matter.