Green Acres vs. Lojban

(or, A Brief Analysis of the Limitations of English-to-Lojban Machine Translation Tools Among the Most Highly Ranked Google Search Results.)

Recently I have been reading about the constructed language Lojban, an offshoot of the “logical language” Loglan, developed in the 1950s. Both languages were designed with the intent of eliminating the ambiguities found in natural languages such as English by ensuring each phrase could be interpreted in exactly one way.

Lojban is an extremely difficult language to master, with fewer than 100 fluent speakers worldwide as of 2024.

Unrelatedly, I have had the theme song from the 1960s TV show Green Acres stuck in my head.

It is a very catchy song.

So naturally, it occurred to me to see what the words to the Green Acres theme song might be if translated to Lojban.

Unfortunately, Google Translate, which is my usual go-to for a quick machine translation, does not offer Lojban as a language option. Further, when I tried to search Google for an English to Lojban translator, Google assumed I was speaking in Hungarian and offered to translate my search request into English.

Why did it assume I speaking Hungarian? Does the word “Lojban” resemble a Hungarian word? Or did Google know that I was planning a Green Acres translation, and, knowing that both the show’s star, Eva Gabor, and her character were Hungarian, use that fact in its language prediction?

No matter. Once I scrolled past the faulty detector, I was presented with a few online translator options. The first one I tried converted these lines:

Green Acres is the place to be. Farm living is the life for me.

Into this:

lo crino aksra cu stuzi lo ka zvati .i lo cipni be lo ka jmive cu xabju mi

Not being a Lojban speaker, and thus not having any idea how accurate this translation might be, I thought it wise to feed the Lojban text back into the translator and have it translated back into English. The result was not quite as accurate as I had hoped:

I live on a green horse.

The second translator I tried gave this translation:

xunre kacma cu stuzi le ka i purdi zvati cu lifri le mi’e se zdani .i le nu zbasu purdi cu lifri le mi’e se gunka.

Unfortunately, it too lacked the ability to make a solid round-trip translation, although its English-to-Lojban-to-English rendering was a bit less terse:

The cooking chamber is south of the house. The garden is located in front of my house. Building the garden is my job.

That, however, was the result of doing a translation using my phone. When I tried again on my laptop, it flew into an infinite loop:

Perhaps the translator was overwhelmed by the song’s catchiness and couldn’t help repeating it forever.

It is a very catchy song.

Next, I turned to ChapGPT to see if it could hallucinate a nice translation for me. To its credit, it offered the following caveat: “Translating idiomatic phrases can be a bit tricky, especially into a constructed language like Lojban. Let me try to translate the meaning rather than a direct word-for-word translation.” And so it came up with this:

Xunre Xekri ku’o cu ckule fi mi. Jipno stuzi cu xamgu la’e di’e.

When asked to translate the translation back into English, it offered this:

Red and black is a school for me. Rural places are good for this.

It’s still wrong, but at least it’s wrong in an entirely new way than the other two wrong translations.

And so it is that, despite a brief search, the perfect Lojban rendering of the Green Acres theme song has eluded me.