Weird idea: Context oriented translation?

[pargenton]

Hi all,
sometimes I play with Bradford's matrix translation and also with Ritsema / Eranos's, yesterday for instance I posted something about 58.4 and I realized that the translation can be very different if we keep in consideration the semantic context of the question.

For instance (disclaimer: I do not know chinese) dui4, in Bradford's glossary can be translated generally as joy, pleasure, happiness (58) but can also be translated as transact, exchange, trade, deliver.

If we keep in mind that the question is related to economics, we could choose and prefer terms with an economic semantic value, for instance trade/transact, instead of joy.

Now, we have all these computers around us, should not be too difficult to take Bradford's matrix to feed a program, tag the terms with attributes, and have a context oriented translation on the fly !

Bashir

[getojack]

I don't think this is a weird idea at all. I wish I'd thought of it. I want to do the commercial for it!

"Is the I Ching too one-sided for you?
Do you wish you could have an oracle that fits your own personal context?
Well now you can!"

Or something like that. :)

[pargenton]

of course it should change :-)

I have a vision :

A computer program which takes in input your semantic bias wanted (e.g. "economics", "relationships", "work issue"..) and then -voila'- it generates a translation on the fly given as a template Bradfors's matrix, what changes is the translation of the chinese ideograms, so we would have for 58 tag, instead of "joy", "trade"....

Bashir

[hilary]

I think you just ruined the livelihood of the people who bring out whole series of print books entitled, 'I Ching for lovers', 'I Ching for business'... (I Ching for career decisions, I Ching for parents, I Ching for owners of neurotic one-eyed goldfish, etc). Terrible shame, that.

[sparhawk]

I think you just ruined the livelihood of the people who bring out whole series of print books entitled, 'I Ching for lovers', 'I Ching for business'... (I Ching for career decisions, I Ching for parents, I Ching for owners of neurotic one-eyed goldfish, etc). Terrible shame, that.

Hey, I even have one called "I Ching for Teens"... Mind you, finding the right context for teenagers has got to be a computer nightmare... :D

[bradford]

have a context oriented translation on the fly !
Bashir

I think you've hit upon one of the main reasons that I did the matrix.
It's in the nature of the Chinese language to derive half of a word's
meaning from the local context in which it sits. So too with the series of
words the Yi gives in response to a question - the question is the context
that shapes half of the reading's meaning. It's important not to narrow
the meanings too much until after the question is asked. That's why I
tried to preserve a wider range of meanings for each of the words.

[pargenton]

and hi to everybody,

Bradford, first of all let me thank you for making available your translations, I truly appreciate them.

I was thinking (no actual project, only thoughts wandering in my mind), now with your matrix translation is possible to do this work by hand, il would be great to make this process easier, don't know exactly how, I'm only sharing this idea.

Bashir

[dobro]

I think you just ruined the livelihood of the people who bring out whole series of print books entitled, 'I Ching for lovers', 'I Ching for business'... (I Ching for career decisions, I Ching for parents, I Ching for owners of neurotic one-eyed goldfish, etc). Terrible shame, that.

You've heard the term 'a musician's musician'. I want an Ichinguerro's I Ching.

[stevev]

... should not be too difficult to take Bradford's matrix to feed a program, tag the terms with attributes, and have a context oriented translation on the fly !
Bashir


maybe not quite what you meant, but I can see semi-randomly generated text based on the question context / category, and some sort of word definition selection, that's easily said.

I've never felt that the "original" text or any commentaries were either mystical truth or logical facts and I’m happy to take a lesson from the footnotes if no other words make sense at the time, who said what is generally irrelevant, except for credit.

I've been seeing web reports about John Cage using the IChing to "generate" songs, and I know that Bowie used to cut up the words and paste them together in different ways to produce some of his songs, so why not generate the answers to questions that way and let chance play a larger role.

Also having processed the Chinese out of the text I’m thinking about processing the IChing out, ie. no references to lines, trigrams and hexagrams etc., just leaving the notions, imagery and sentiment.

[dobro]

I write songs. One time, I used the Yi to write a song - it was a good song, and I still use it. But what a lot of work! It took hours. For each phrase and line in the song, I consulted the Yi to see what it had to say about it. I'd chuck the idea out if the Yi was thumbs down on it, I'd keep it if the Yi was thumbs up, and I'd tweak it if the Yi suggested that.

When it was done, I decided that I'd be way ahead of the game if I just wrote songs as I usually do, tuning my attention in to the source of inspiration and trusting my hunches.

[bernie]

I appreciate very much Bradford matrix translation, although I don't use for divination, only for study.
I think that if somebody loads a database with every possible meaning for each character and assign a category for each term (in my view not an easy task) still the program will generate an abstract mosaic of words as divination answers, but I doubt very much that is is the thing most people want to receive.
Now, making a program that can articulate words in meaningful phases, that would be great and I would respect much the programer who did that. (a bowing smiley would be required here).

Of course you can keep it simple and use the three main categories: health, love, and money and put premade phrases there, but you would have to write three texts, not one.