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A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING.

Translation Rules

The following is a list of translation rules for some common and not so common machine translation projects. This information was collected over several decades of writing tools to perform machine translation and should not be considered as state of the art or complete.

Available choices

If you have a rule set for a machine translator that you would like to see included here, please send them.

Swedish Chef Rules

  1. All paragraphs end in Bork bork bork.
  2. a by itself (word) is not translated
  3. First i in word becomes ee
  4. en at end of word becomes ee
  5. Replace e at beginning of word with i
  6. Replace the by itself (word) with zee
  7. If there is an e at the end of a word, replace with e-a
  8. Replace tion with shun
  9. Inside any word:
    • a becomes e
    • an becomes un
    • au or ow or u becomes oo
    • f becomes ff
    • ir becomes ur
    • o becomes u
    • v becomes f
    • w becomes v
Care should be taken to prevent any rule from recursively changing the results other rules.

Pig Latin Rules

Brute Force Method

  1. If word starts with a vowel, add ay to end
  2. Otherwise move first letter to end and add ay

Note: The above method is trivial to code, but creates output that can be very hard to speak when multiple consonants are combined into a blend such as Th, Br, Ch, and Qu.

Simple Spoken Method

  1. If word is a then add yay or way to end
  2. If word starts with vowel, simply add ay to end
  3. Move first consonant sound (up to first vowel) to end of word and add ay
    Special case for words starting with qu, move pair to end and add ay

Optional formatting for easier reading and decoding, include hyphen (-) between remainder of root word and the new ending (e.g. pig latin becomes ig-pay atin-lay).

First published 2007-06-10. The last major review or update of this information was on 2007-06-10. Your feedback using the form below helps us correct errors and omissions on this page.