THE DESIGN OF E-SPERANTO – A COMPUTER LANGUAGE FOR RECORDING MULTILINGUAL TEXTS ON THE WEB
Keywords:
E-speranto, multilingual Web, interpretation, XMLAbstract
The present paper describes the design of E-speranto, a formal computer language for recording multilingual texts on the Web. The vocabulary and grammar of E-speranto are based on the international auxiliary language Esperanto, while its syntax is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The latter is one of the key features of E-speranto, as it enables a natural integration of E-speranto documents into web pages. When a user visits such a web page, its content is interpreted and displayed in the user’s preferred language. Due to the fact that E-speranto is a formal language, it is much easier for computers to comprehend documents created in this language than to comprehend texts written in natural languages. The documents in E-speranto can be created directly with the aid of tools designed especially for this purpose. For a practical application of E-speranto, each linguistic group merely needs to develop the interpreter of E-speranto for their own language. We designed a proof-of-concept implementation of the multilingual Web based on E-speranto. The testing confirmed the applicability of the concept and indicated the guidelines for further development.
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