ELL: update on the Transparent Language Systems offer

[Nicholas Ostler]

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Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 15:36:28 +0100
To: endangered-languages-l at carmen.murdoch.edu.au
From: Nicholas Ostler <nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: ELL: update on the Transparent Language Systems offer
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>At 15:01 01/04/99 -0500, Dave Harris wrote:
>>I went to the Transparent website and read a little more about TLS's offer
>>to provide templates for producing endangered-language tutorials and was
>>disappointed to discover that TLS wants $100,000 per language.. ..
>>... Am I wrong to think that
>>$100,000 is an awful lot of money?
>
At 10:09 am +0100 2/4/99, Jeff ALLEN wrote:
>Dave et al.,
>
>Just a comment from a person who has worked in the field of machine
>translation,
>translation technologies, and related fields for both research and commercial
>products.
>
>$100 000 sounds like a lot of money to you, but let me give you some figures
>that are known and discussed in machine translation conferences and meetings.
...

This is all very well, but Jeff's ensuing dicussion is all about MT
systems.  The Transparent Language Systems offer is about a
language-learning environment, a very different suite of software, which
needs to be much less exhaustive in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but no
doubt much more user-friendly in terms of interface, multimedia support etc.

In fact, the real question is: HOW MUCH of a course anyone accepting the
TLS offer will get for their money? It could be no more than an elementary
one, or it could aim to give a full conspectus of the grammar, with (say) a
30,000 word vocabulary.

In fact, a useful index of the size of project envisaged would be the size
of vocabulary (in lexemes, or lexemes + idioms) which would be
pedagogically treated.  Another might be the number of lessons or units
that would produced.  (Once you ponder this, of course, you have to wonder
how there can be a general 100,000 dollar fee: my gut feeling is that
there's a lot more training needed for Navajo than for Maori, or for
Kabardian than for Gallego.)

Let's get the question straight, before we go to TLS for their side of things.


----------------------------------------------------------------
                       Nicholas   Ostler
						Linguacubun Ltd
						          "technology for the
                       languages of the world"

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						                   nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk


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