Language translator script?

[sinck@ugive.com]

\_ could do what I wanted.  Basically I'm hoping to find a script or program that
\_ can take english and parse it into dwarven (maybe by reading a text file),
\_ something along the lines of an ircbot without needing to connect to irc.  I

Ah, NLP raises it's ugly head at last in PLUG.  /me shivers

There's a problem with doing what you suggest.  Well, more than one,
but we'll forgo verb tensing, syntax, false cognates, typo handling,
and a host of others and deal with one everyone can grasp and is fun:
idioms.

Idioms are the magic that makes a language colorful.  "You're a pain
in the ass" does not literally translate to the concept of you being
a tender spot on a mule.  However, stupid translators will translate
it that way...and miss.

So, unless the Dragon article has gone *way* deep, it's just a crude
approximation of a real language.  Crude approximations can be hacked,
but leave plenty of room for doubt.

You can code an amusing "little" perl script in ~20 lines of driver
code + X number of substitution lines to do a stupid translation.  But
what happens when you type in a word the translator doesn't know?  Or
you pull a typo?  Or proper names?  

So....  It's amusing as a thought, but I don't think it's a go unless
Dragon did it right, and that is a pain.

As an alternate you could try Klingon.  There are whole books and
probably several things online to help with the proper pronuncian of
'gahk'.  It wouldn't suprise me if someone even coded the phenomes for
you.  

I'll be happy to gen the wrapper script, but you'd have to cope with
typing in valid perl expressions to do the substitutions.

David