Phone Game: Mr/Ms Smooth

[cbmvax!uunet!MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU!nsn]

You know how this works.

Nora's salacious starting sentence was:

Every time I see him, he's hanging around with someone else, smoothtalking
his way into their pants. Lemme tell ya, the guy wrote the book on Smooth!
What a bastard...

Nora translated this as:

ri'e ca ro ba'u lemi nunzgana be ko'a ku ko'a jikca za'a da poi drata ku'o
gi'e malticta'axlu ri le nu ri gletu ko'a  .i pe'icai certu u'e le nu
malticta'axlu kei fa ko'a i'enaicai

Nick takes a break from regular programming to suggest that {nunzgana be ko'a}
means that ko'a is looking (at me?), and that {nunzgana befi ko'a} is more
appropriate. (The rationale being that the scheme, {x0 nu x1 broda x2 x3}==
{x0 nunbroda x1 x2 x3}, is far more sensible than any alternative, and that
saying {lemi} is cheating, since {mi} should still be a place of {nunzgana}.

End of dikyjvo peeve.

What else? I don't know if {jikca} is the most informative translation of
"hang around". One will note, on the other hand, the tendency to simplify
the selbri valsi (as opposed to the sumti): relation takes over description,
and getting the right number and type of arguments for your selbri is often
enough in current Lojban.

{da poi drata} - other to what? It is true that one can overspecify; none
the less, I'd have preferred {lo cnino} here. Ellipsise, yes, if you have a
good appreciation of what the likely default interpretation is. Not to be
Jim Carter, but {drata be le purci} is not as plausible here as {drata be
ko'a} (for reasons which I'm sure make fascinating pragmatics.)

{malticta'axlu} isn't the frying-pan-across-forehead metaphor that "talk their
way into their pants" is; for the alternative, see the appendix.

Is the inversion of {ko'a} in the second sentence succesful? Consider this
a weak "yes".

Mark:

]Nora really digs UIs, and I suppose that's for the best.

(Now this is a perpetual problem. One the one hand, prose from Fairfax VA
always sounds like an eyebrow-lifting exercise for the profusion of UI. We
outside Fairfax seem to use the beasts much less. On t'other, we do need
the buggers. In Lojban, we have no pragmatics, no nuancey synonyms, no
colloquialisms with which to say what we take for granted in NLs.)


Geez!  Like every time I see him, he's socializing with others and flirting
with them to get them to fuck him.  Huh!  A real expert at flirting, that's
what he is.


Like chill out dude, quoth I :)

]Needless to say, I did some nice sexist stuff by assuming that {ko'a} is
]male.  There's really nothing for this, I have to pick one sex or another.

Yup. The sex of the, er, other is of more interest to me; the point being,
of course, that since women wear pants nowadays, it really is unguessable.
I find this charming (of course, what hetboys think is charming does not a
nonprejudicial AL make). (Heh. It's been a loooong time since I wrote that
last sentence, and a lot of things have changed. I no longer consider myself
a hetboy, for one :) :)

malticta'axlu is flirting? Not really; Nora captured the fact that
"smoothtalking" is about maltcica (deceipt). Flirting isn't necessarily
(mutual consent, play), though in context it's the most obvious translation.

Foithermore, is {pe'icai} ("I really really think that...") equivalent to
"Huh!"? That sounds to me more like {.ionai} ("I dis!")

"someone else" = "someone new" has definitely gone byebye. It will be sorely
missed.

Ivan:

ramta'a ri tezu'e lenu se gletu  .i.i'enai mulno leka ramta'a certu

Where Nora let go emotionally and exaggerated, Ivan is in wonderment - and
slight disbelief (or: he's being ironic; we haven't 100% extricated the
two yet). His {ro} is no exaggeration; this is reasonable. He reinterprets
"see" to "meet" ("bump into"); this is not what I'd intended, but again,
this is reasonable extrapolation in English. {drata} is once more
underspecified. {ramta'a} has no component of {tcica} in it; on the other
hand, it's closer to "smoothtalking" than "flirting", which is as much
behaviour/courtship ritual. Whatever *is* the difference between {mu'i}
and {tezu'e}? "Huh" works for Ivan, I see :) Thankfully, Mark's syntax
("that's what he is") made sure (sureish) that we're not quite patting
Mr Smooth on the back for his behaviour yet.

I'm fascinated by the {se gletu} that Nora put in as spanner in the works.
Beside the fact that I think the transitivity of {gletu} to be bogus,
was Nora interpreting something there? Hm.

Colin exclaims:

I can't believe it! Every time we meet, she's with somebody else, and
sweet-talking them into getting laid. She's a real pro atsweet-talking -
I wouldn't want to be like that.

That "I can't believe it!" is Mark's "Geez". Geez, Nick echoes.
Nora's {se gletu} finally inverted the sex of Mr Smooth. I *am* finding this
amusing.
{lo drata} finally resurfaces as "somebody else [new]" (if I don't misinterpret
the English excessively), and interestingly enough, we've come back from
"flirting" to "sweet-talking". Sweet-talking is still not deceipt, but it's
not flirting either - nor is it, in fact, quite {ramta'a} ("speaking words
of lurrrve")
"*I* wouldn't want to"? A bit of a leap from "I'm disgusted with her actions" to
"I wouldn't". Not much of a leap, but still...

Sylvia finishes off with:

lurta'a fi le nu ri se gletu .i ko'a cu ja'a certu le nu cinse lurta'a

Putting in the missing {lenu} and {kei}, Sylvia still hasn't captured the
"Every" in "Every time we meet" - the {ta'e} can't really modify {penmi}.
{le} in {cnino prenu} is not necessarily wrong. I *like* {lurta'a} (it is,
of course, the same base concept as in ta'axlu).

]I was not sure when I saw 'she' used as the pronoun whether this person
]was originaly male, but the gender had gotten lost in translation, or
]if the person was female, and the gender information has been retained
]through 4 translations.  I decided that it was highly probable that
]the gender was not transmitted correctly, or if it  was, that the correct
]gender was coincidental.  Therefore, I decided not to attempt to transmit
]the information that 'ko'a' was female.

]I realize that 'se gletu' may not be zanlojbo, but I was trying to convey
]that 'ko'a' was the more active party in the activity, and that le cnino
]prenu was submitting to 'ko'a's whims.  (this lojban with apostrophes/
]English mix is ugly)

OK, so we started with:

Every time I see him, he's hanging around with someone else, smoothtalking
his way into their pants. Lemme tell ya, the guy wrote the book on Smooth!
What a bastard...

and finished with:

Unbelievable! When I meet X, X is usually with the new person, and
sexually persuading him/her to get laid. X is indeed an expert in sexual
persuasion. I don't want to be that.

The lesson for today, children, is Attitudinals Are Good. Ite, missa est.

Here follow extensive Lojbab comments: please ponder them, and get back
to me with your ideas. I do prefer the colloquial mode of translation,
rather than preserving the English wording (if you didn't notice, the
surprise when Colin and Mark passed through a sentence into the identical
English was not one of pleasure.) But I still think the chaos of information
loss is instructive enough in itself...

Lojbab:

After I saw the sentence you gave Nora, I decided to try it myself,
partly for the practice, since I'm having to take several days off
Lojban technical work for other business (my and LLG's taxes, orders,
etc.), and partly because I'm still unhappy that you haven't ever
addressed what the goal of these games are.  It seems essential that the
goal of the game be agreed upon, because it drastically affects the
style of the translation.  I've done two versions of Nora's sentence,
after looking at her version (so a couple of her observations made it
into mine that might not otherwise - but then I'm not playing the game).

Please save this and include it in your commentary.  []

If the goal in the game is to communicate both the sense of the original
language AND the features of the language so that the next
back-translator has the maximum chance to reconstruct something close to
the original English, you need to translate individual words
hyper-accurately as well as sentence orderings.  In short, you have to
play a sort of machine translator using Lojban as the interlingua of an
English (source language) to interlingua to English (target language)
translation system.  Such a translation will tend to be wordy, heavily
conventionalized, have NO Lojban internal stylistics - the object is to
reflect English stylistics, and probably have excess attitudinals and
discursives compared to the way someone would naturally say it.  The
following is my version of such a translation.  I've used Lojban
structures to phrase-group the English sentence structure.  I've
translated single words as single words (smoothtalking), and phrases as
phrases (wrote the book, hanging around).  I've tried to make it
plausible that the back-translator will select the colloquialism that we
started with, though some words may have more than one such translation
(e.g., malbre could be "bastard" or "son of a bitch").  The result is
speakable and understandable as Lojban and stylistically quite Lojbanic,
but not very colloquial.  I'd call it more a literary Lojban.  You might
call it playing with the features of the language (especially my
subscripted variable - which was Nora's idea, by the way, when I pointed
out that her "drata" had too much ellipsized:  I read hers as ko'a
talking to someone else as opposed to himself.  She is relying a bit on
funky quantification rules to suggest the intended meaning - I'm sure no
one will catch the significance of her quantification order).

seisa'a ko'a nakni .i fu'e .i'enaicairi'e roba'u lenu mi zgana ko'a zo'u
ko'a jikca vanbi daxi veitu'osu'ipa goi ko'e gi'eca'obo malxlujikta'a
ko'e tezu'e lemu'e snada tu'aro'u le selvau be leko'e palku .i pe'icai
tecu'u do ga'icu'i zo'u ko'a ka'e ba'o tercku fi le traji fe la ka
malxlujikca .i ionai .iunaicai malbre


On the other hand, what this loses is the whole feeling of naturalness -
the colloquial locker-room feel of the original.  (In a machine
translation, such context information as where and how and between what
types of people the quote was expressed should also be encoded in the
translation, and I didn't try for that above, except in giving the
possibly significant gender of ko'a metalinguistically - note that when
Nora first read the quote she misread it:  as a woman, she had most
often heard the expression "trying to get into sbj's pants" said only of
a woman, rather than a man and thus read the "their" as "his" [])

If on the other hand, the main idea is to convey information and
style/manner across the translation, rather as if translating a drama
that is to be performed in Lojban and THEN to have the drama
back-translated to English retaining the same plot and stylistics, but
not necessarily the same words, you have to express things a lot
differently.  My sense of colloquial Lojban is that it will be heavily
based on observatives, with many short sentences, with possibly an
attitudinal (but only one and it will be simple) attached to many if not
most sentences.  This is my sense of the way our most lively Lojban
conversation sessions tend.

The following translation thus tries to purely communicate the speaker's
ideas and emotions, but trying to do so in a colloquial Lojban way.
Note that it is only half as long as the first version, and shorter than
the English.  But I think it conveys everything.  However, a
back-translator would have no hope of reconstructing the original
English, and shouldn't try, choosing instead to also translate
ideas/emotions/manner.  The English that resulted would hopefully
express the same thing, but might have a totally different structure,
word choices, etc.

malterzu'e tavla

Nora says that she did something kind of half-way in between.  She tried
to capture the style with a more colloquial Lojban while preserving the
English order and manner of presentation.  Mark will be unlikely to get
the original text, and if everyone translates in the same spirit as
Nora, by the time it gets back to her, probably there will be few words
alike, but the result will be fairly colloquial (not rigidly formal like
some of Sylvia's attempts - she goes towards my first extreme), about
the same length and with the same ideas expressed in approximately the
same order.  (Of course, if Nora's translation were read by a woman who
thinks like Nora, the gender of ko'a might have become female - it will
be interesting to see what Sylvia does with the final to-English version
since gender information is not present in Nora's translation.)

Most of the last phone game translations appear to have been
considerably more literal, without quite being as analytical as my
first.  But then, with the possible exception of sentence 3, they were
sentences that were complex and literary rather than colloquial.  You
seem satisfied with the results of the last game, but even so, I cannot
say that I understand
what YOU think a successful game would be, or what anyone else would either.
Should the final text be the same as the first?  Or is the idea to see how
strange people can get while making purely logical deductions about what the
previous person's version was.

I find it hard to envision playing in a game when I don't rellay know the
rules or the object of the game.  At best, fyky seems like it is becoming
a version of Lojban bridge (the card game).  Bridge, as you may know, is
impossible to play with any quality unless the partners have agreed upon
some conventions and goals in advance.  Otherwise, while communication may
occur in the limited language of the game, more often, people end up working
at cross-purposes.  (one reason I like Dungeons and Dragons is that the
players cooperate towards achieving amutual goal, and communicate about that
cooperation during the game - successful gamers tend to be those that are
best at working out a consistent way of working with the others while
achieving individuality of style.  What better analogy to what I think we
want to happen with Lojban could there be?)

lojbab

---
Nick Nicholas: [s]h[r]ug-osexual.  Greek, short, greasy, and horny as a...
B1 f+ t- w s-? e- r--		   ...scattering wistful summer's cloud?!?!
nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au (IRC: nicxjo). Likes Cavafy, Mahler, and cashews.