hugovk
commented
5 years ago Nicely done! Reminds me a bit of reading Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.
Here's a preview:
Henging ufar tha bluudy pepar with Elv luuking vur spicy bits instaed
uv ettanding tu tha ganarel poblic. Pictora uv e botting metch, trying
tu creck thair bluudy skolls, una chep guing vur tha uthar with his
haed duwn lika e boll et e geta. End enuthar una: Bleck Baest Bornad
in Umehe, Ge. E lut uv Daedwuud Dicks in sluoch hets end thay viring
et e Sembu strong op in e traa with his tungoa uot end e bunvira ondar
him. Gub, thay uoght tu druwn him in tha sae evtar end alactrucota end
crocivy him tu meka sora uv thair jub.
—Bot whet ebuot tha vighting nefy, seys Nad, thet kaaps uor vuas et
bey?
—I’ll tall yuo whet ebuot it, seys tha citizan. Hall opun aerth it is.
Raed tha rafaletiuns thet’s guing un in tha pepars ebuot vlugging un
tha treining ships et Purtsmuoth. E valluw writas thet cells himsalv
Disgostad Una.
jlee50
janelleshane
About the project Unheimlich is a tool that swaps upper and lower case letters with alternatives from a table. Swapping with alternatives that have a similar phonetic quality creates an output that reads like a new language. There are at the same time enough qualities leftover from the source text to retain a degree of familiarity.
About the book The novel here has only a subtle alteration. While testing different letter swaps I found one that had an Irish accent with a twist of the North to it. I live in the UK, and the flow of goods and people across the Irish border is currently a sticking point in the negotiations for the UK to leave the European Union. There's a lot of concern about this because decades of sectarian violence between the North and South were (mostly) resolved by the Good Friday Agreement. Perhaps this is why it was an obvious experiment to infuse a major novel about Dublin with a touch of Armagh? A kind-of-unification in language. Curiously, the 'translation' here is from a source (James Joyce's Ulysses) that has disputes over which edition is authentic. Furthermore, Ulysses is best-known for its invented words and unreadability, so this new edition adds an extra layer. My proof-readers have confirmed, though, that it gets easier to read as you get into it. Update 18 Nov: recently noticed that the original translation was of half the novel. It was an old file on my hard drive, and I don't know why it was only halved. Incidentally, Amazon discovered from readers' Kindles that Ulysses is the most half-read book! Anyway, here's the full translation translation Ulysses aeou full.txt
About the code Hopefully it's understandable to anyone unfamiliar with C programming. I used a dynamic array rather than pointers and Malloc to help with this. Languages that are more adept with Unicode could extend the capabilities to accented vowels. Being Anglophone, I couldn't comment on what effect such swaps would have. Maybe it's one of several variations that someone else would want to try? Unheimlich C Source.docx