JRR Tolkein created
Elvish for Lord of the Rings. The Droogs of Clockwork Orange rant and rave in
Nadsat. Trekkies discuss the Final Frontier in Klingon. And now, thanks to this online
translator, Snickers is teaching the world how to speak
Snacklish.
Snacklish is a social
media site I worked on at Chiat New York. Type in any word you can think of and
the translator spits out its Snacklish equivalent. Creating a language that
actually works wasn’t easy. We started by applying the basic principles of
Snacklish to over 10,000 words. These direct translations took care of the most
popular names, places, nouns, and verbs. But people could – and would – type in
anything. So we applied just under 1,000 linguistic rules and prioritized their
order. What did we end up with? Every letter combination in the English
language had a rule. That means there’s no such thing as a bad translation.
The site makes it
easy for users to email Snacklish to friends, download desktop wallpaper, share
translations on Twitter, Facebook and Digg, and even have custom t-shirts
printed. In the first month, the site received over 2 million hits. While it's more fun to go to the site and type in a few
words, here are a few screen shots. Enjoy.
Comments