Cartoons, literature and languages

I have been watching Ramayana-The legend of Ram on Cartoon Network this Navratri. The cartoon is well made. The visuals, the voice over, the language, the words were flawless although the animation was just okay. I am not qualified to point out any glaring mistakes in the script as I wouldn't know which version of the story matches the one written by Vyasa. As long as the story stays in place at a high level and the cartoon encourages children to watch it, I wouldn't find anything terribly offensive.

Talking about Indian cartoons, the four-part, Krishna-the animated series on Pogo, aired early this summer was so addictive. Although the animation itself can't be termed as great, there was something about it that made my both my sister and me, stick on to the TV and watch the marathon run every Sunday. I even watched the repeat telecast over the week whenever I could! The songs were so hummable. I tried looking for them, the lyrics, on the internet. In vain.

I admit the English was a little crappy at times, drawing nasty remarks from certain people who must have been jealous that I happened to watch it to completion while they couldn't. But it was cute-crappy. It was almost as if it were intentionally made to sound childishly cute and incorrect. :) I will have to say, it doesn't set a great example if children were allowed to watch the cartoon to learn good English. But who watches Krishna to set examples about good language?! Of course, I would first recommend Panchatantra picture stories being read out to children before cartoons. They really shouldn't get the easy way out all the time!

Indian literature is filled with so many such examples of rich masterpieces, many that I might be able to read and understand with some effort and serious inclination. But I end up watching the children's cartoon version of the literature masterpieces in some foreign language! I just wonder what the originals were like. What am I missing?

Talking about the accessibility of literature across cultures, languages and geographies, technology hasn't advanced so much as to reduce the barrier that knowledge of a language or rather the lack thereof, imposes. Translating services are available but they are still in the nascent stages of the innovation cycle. A lot more work needs to be done before we can see scalable versions of a product where volumes of text, audio and video can be translated real-time across languages with semantics in tact (how tough is that? Even more so when some words just don't have equivalents!).

web3.0 maybe on its way. NLP, context sensitive grammars, translators. Wonder what kind of theoretical knowledge is required to understand this? I shall ask around.

A question: when can two words be said to be semantically equivalent. Yes, having to consider the context as well. And the multiple connotations a word can have. Hey won't figuring out the multiple connotations eventually lead us to detecting humour in text? The first step to simulating humour! No, I guess I got the order wrong. The intelligence required, computationally, to simulate humour might be less than what it would take to detect humour, because of the inherently generic nature of humour.