RinkWorks: Stupid Emails: Translation Technology Task

619. Translation Technology Task

To:  rinkworks@rinkworks.com
Subject:  Dialectizer Technology
Date:  Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:55:31 -0400

Good afternoon,

     I am emailing you to give you a business proposal for your
consideration. I am a senior Game Master for a free online video game
community www.shadesoftruth.net. This video game is strictly
IC(in-character). That being said, players are not permitted to speak
OOC(out-of-character) while addressing individuals inside of the game
without prior permission(through whispers[IMs]). What I would like from you
is for you to help us using your technology to set up a language conversion
for an in-character "foreign language". It is completely fictional. Even
more so then Tengwar from the story Lord of the Rings(which is based off of
other languages).

This language will be the primary language of the antagonists for the video
game. To this date we've been using another technology that rather than
translate, scrambles text, preventing players from being able to understand
the antagonists. I would like to take it a step further and develop an
official language and obtain the translation technology for use on exclusive
access servers for the GMs to operate it and use it in-game.

We can not offer a lot of money, but what we can offer is cross-advertising
for this technology.

Thank you for your consideration.

From:  Samuel Stoddard <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  Re: Dialectizer Technology
Date:  Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:43:56 -0400

That sounds like a fun project for someone, but The Dialectizer is not going
to cut it.  The Dialectizer is really just a simple search-and-replace engine
at heart.  It doesn't inherently understand words, let alone grammar
constructs and sentence diagrams, which is what it sounds like you need.
If you simplified the translation requirements enough to permit a simple
word-by-word substitution of one English word into another -- which would
essentially be inventing a vocabulary but preserving English grammar
constructs -- that would be a very very easy programming job (not something
you'd need to contract someone like me to do), but would still require a
significant time investment on someone's part to invent the vocabulary.

The bottom line is that there is no way I can do this for mere
cross-advertising, but I'm probably not the guy you want anyway.  Your
best bet to get it done on a budget is to find someone who is already
a fan of the game and wouldn't mind investing work into it at a discount.

Best of luck.

-- Sam.

To:  Samuel Stoddard <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  Re: Dialectizer Technology
Date:  Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:32:57 -0400

What if we already had a vocabulary and just needed the infrastructure to
incorporate new vocabulary into? Your technology seems simple enough and
we've been planning on using a simple system to basically substitute in
words without respect to grammar.

To:  Samuel Stoddard <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  Re: Dialectizer Technology
Date:  Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:32:17 -0400

Essentially all that is required chiefly is the instruction for adding
definitions for the applet to look for and the applet source itself.

From:  Samuel Stoddard <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  Re: Dialectizer Technology
Date:  Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:14:11 -0400

That simplifies the project enormously, but I still can't work for you just
for advertising.

But as you say, the technology is simple.  It should be trivial for any
reasonably experienced programmer to put together in an afternoon.

1. Some initialization code reads in a data file with your word substitutions
in it.  Store them in a hash table (aka dictionary) object with the English
word as the key and the substitution as the value.

2. Write a function where a line of English text is passed in and a translated
line is returned.  The function splits the string on space characters,
iterates through the words, looking up each in the hash table and replacing
it with the substitution it finds there.  You have to decide what to do
with words that don't exist in the hash table:  either leave them as-is
or delete them or something else.

-- Sam.

On second thought, why DIDN'T I charge the guy an expensive contracting rate to write "search and replace" for him?