This tool will translate normal English, with correct spelling, punctuation and sentence
construction into the weird and surreal language that seems to be in wide use on the popular
social networking site Facebook. Unfortunately there's
no way to translate from Facebook back to English, and in this regard I share your frustration
if you are having trouble understanding what your friends are saying in their status updates.
Eventually it will be made available as a web service, although I can't think who might use it.
Also I've had reports that it doesn't work with IE6. Sorry, but it's not 2001 any more,
upgrade and be happy.
What does it do?
The following steps are performed during translation into barely intelligible drivel:
- All commas and apostrophes are removed. Nobody needs them and their sentence-meaning-changing abilities.
- Full stops (periods) are replaced with two exclamation marks.
- Simple word substitutions:
- "your" becomes "ur".
- "you" becomes "u".
- "to" becomes "2".
- "this" becomes "dis".
- "their" becomes "there".
- "the" becomes "teh".
- "are" becomes "r".
- "some" becomes "sum".
- "because" becomes "cuz".
- "and" is replaced with the ampersand.
- Any instances of "youre" created by removing the apostrophes are replaced with "your".
- The "g" is removed from all words ending in "ing".
- Number words from one through to ten are replaced by numerals.
- Similarly, "first" is replaced with "1st", etc.
- Between three and eight exclamation marks are added to the end.
- Between one and three "1"s are added to the exclamation marks.
- The customary "lol xx" is then added to the end.
- Finally, the whole text is converted into all lowercase or all uppercase characters.
Note that the strange Facebook language is distinctly different to "txt spk", which has no
vowels or punctuation marks whatsoever.
Too much hassle having to use this tool to translate everything before
posting it to Facebook? Then you need the all new Facebook
Keyboard!
