The Universal Translator Assistant Project
Universal Translator Assistant is an automated translation tool for mapping two languages. After I acquired a machine-readable copy of the WEB Bible translation (http://www.ebible.org/bible/WEB/webfaq.htm ) and began doing a number of text processing things with it. Along the way I realized it was easy to create a list of all the unique words in a passage. From there I wondered "what would happen if I took such a list, say from Isaiah 1, and (free of context) mapped each word (that I could) to a Klingon word. With such a mapping, I could quickly lay out the words in a verse, and reshape them into a grammatical Klingon translation. What was particularly interesting was the result of using this to 'translate' a phrase into Klingon, and then back to English. While it (of course) renders an atrocious meaningless Klingon phrase. I found that the back-translation resembled the broken English of a person learning English as a second language. While of limited practical use, it demonstrated to me that I was indeed modeling one form of language mapping that occurs among humans.
