Every big blue boxer

Have a glimpse at what the program I’m writing for my B.A. thesis in progress can do.

?- translate.

> Every big blue boxer that kills every big blue woman that is Mia loves a robber.

1 Jede große blaue Boxerin, die jede große blaue Frau, die Mia ist, tötet, liebt eine Räuberin.
2 Jede große blaue Boxerin, die jede große blaue Frau, die Mia ist, tötet, liebt einen Räuber.
3 Jeder große blaue Boxer, der jede große blaue Frau, die Mia ist, tötet, liebt eine Räuberin.
4 Jeder große blaue Boxer, der jede große blaue Frau, die Mia ist, tötet, liebt einen Räuber.

Yay! That is quite some syntactic complexity already, isn’t it? Never mind the crazy contents, I haven’t spent much time on the lexicon yet.

The main problem here is that none of the four offered sentences is a correct translation of the exquisitly gender-unaware English sentence. I actually spent most of the afternoon and evening on gendering issues only to find out that to achieve a satisfactory general solution, I’ll probably have to invest the better part of another day. What I would like for the above example is the following. It’s how I would express the state of affairs politically correctly.

Jede/r große blaue Boxer/in, der/die jede große blaue Frau,
die Mia ist, tötet, liebt eine/n Räuber/in.

Then of course there’s the blemish that the inner relative clause is not sufficiently extrapolated to sound nice. I’ll fix that too.

If you would like to stalk me at work and have access to my code repository, please let me know. Currently I can’t make it public like Aleks’s because I also store literature in there.

2 Gedanken zu „Every big blue boxer

  1. aleks

    If you use git, you can (for example) also put *pdf in .gitignore. I actually store pdfs in my repo, too, it’s just that I don’t upload them ;-)

  2. ke Beitragsautor

    *sigh* Don’t get your hopes up, boys and girls, boxers and women, I didn’t manage to fix *either* of the blemishes mentioned in the post. The grammar architecture of my generator proved to unflexible to do it within two days… and I had to start writing the actual thesis some time.

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