Why another Star Wars Translator?
There actually aren't a lot of translators. What we have are:
- Static lists of words or phrases. Sometimes the list is only a few dozen words, really making it difficult to construct any kind of actual sentences without inventing most of it on the fly.
- Some additional translators, which I have linked in the Other Translators menu on the main page.
So the Coruscant Translator is built along the same lines as Google Translate:
- It has multiple languages, with the capacity to hold all the languages we'd ever want.
- Translating either to or from an alien language will often return more than one word. Hover over your translation to see the word or phrase it was translated from, then click on it to get additional information about the translation along with alternate translations.
- When you select one of the alternate translations from the dropdown, it will instantly update your translation.
- The site learns. Each time you select an alternate translation, it remembers that choice and will be more likely to use that as the translation in the future.
Also, I have included additional features to make it friendly for role-playing:
- The box labeled CIC stands for Conversation ID Code. This allows you to share your translations with someone else. So, if you have a group of a few people who all speak a certain language, you can give them the code, and you can talk back and forth, using only the alien text in game or a story.
- In the history window, the output will also track when the speakers have shifted from language to another.
- You will be assigned a random user name when you first use the page. The Translator stamps your conversations with an IP address. So if you enter your character name, it will look for that IP address and backfill any generic names it finds. It will only backfill generic names, so you can even switch characters without overwriting the speaker of old dialogues.
- The site uses some basic cookies to remember your settings.
- As an advanced option, you can also specify if you'd like your original text included in 《angled brackets》. The history window will always include the original text.
- Another advanced option will allow you to change your time offset, so you see the translations stamped in your local time (defaults to GMT-5).
These are my sources for the data:
The bulk of all languages are created by character replacing from Esperanto, a constructed language created in 1887 by linguist L. L. Zamenhof.
I chose this language as I felt it would offer a very rigid and logical basis from which to start the fictional languages.
I do character analysis of known words of these alien languages (when possible) and use that to make a letter-to-letter mapping from Esperanto to the alien language. This allows a language to have a certain feel that will make it seem a little different from the other languages made with the same method.
- Catharese: Mainly taken from Jeos, a roleplayer in the SWTOR community (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzQtc0yRonNkb0NZc2JiMkQ3UWc), but this has many additions to the language to flesh out the language as the original dictionary only had about 8,000 words. Catharese now nearly triples the dictionary size, so you should see many more matches than using High Cathar.
- High Cathar: Mainly taken from Jeos, a roleplayer in the SWTOR community (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzQtc0yRonNkb0NZc2JiMkQ3UWc).
- Cheunh: Wookieepedia.
- Echani: Invented, derived from the words I made for Thyrsian with a general aim to make the words similar but not identical. For example, Thyrsian has all words ending in vowels, except for plurals that end in the letter N. Echani has more variation to the word endings.
- High Sith: This has a number of very similar words to Sith but also has a lot of divergence and adheres to the Wookieepedia version.
- Huttese: Wookieepedia.
- Mando'a: Mandoa.org (http://mandoa.org), Karen Traviss (Adrian Thomas-Prestemon http://mandoa.org)
- Mirialan: Based off Sirasielic with remaining words inspired from Quecha, made by Astrea, Asyria, Davrek Tynor, Jeca Cutrer, Killian, Naszar'ado'soro, Rabbly, Riandora, Ryger, Sindol Sei, Talae Redas (Sirasielic on SWTOR-RP Wiki, now defunct and found via the Internet Archive).
- Minisiat: No additional sources.
- Ortolan: Inspired by in-game voiceovers in SWTOR.
- Old Corellian: This is somewhat unique, as it's meant to have some strong crossovers with modern Basic. So that means some of the words will be completely different, others may be very similar to their Basic counterparts and some may even be identical or near-identical.
- Proto-Basic: A modified version of Old Corellian.
- Ryl: Wookieepedia, Temple of Kika'lekki (http://www.peach-tree.org/Ryloth/TwiInfo/Lexicon.htm, now defunct and found via the Internet Archive).
- Sith: Starsider Galaxy, (http://www.starsidergalaxy.com/sith/).
- Smuggler's Cant: Wookieepedia. More of a very small set of codewords than a language. Note that very little will be translated since the wordset is in the dozens as opposed to thousands.
- Thyrsian: Invented, with the exception of the numerals zero through four. (Thyrsian (language) | Wookieepedia)
- Zabraki: Wookieepedia, The Zabrak Society's Ul'Zabrak from (http://www.dream-designs.net/zabrak/language.html).
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