English (UK)

[robinturner]

Facebook have just asked for my help: "Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages."

Firstly, translating something into British English, while admirable, will not enable people all over the world to use it in all languages, even if there are any people in the world who are capable of using Facebook in all languages.

Secondly, why do they need my help in translating facebook into English (UK)? Come on, chaps, it's not that difficult. The spelling part is easy: just change the language to English (UK) and see what the spell-checker underlines, then put in all the useless extra U's and change a few Z's to S's. After that, you can do things like changing "really" to "jolly", "friends" to "pals", "mates" or "chums" (depending on the region and era you want to go for) and "cool" to "spiffing". You don't need me; you need a Perl script.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

whoops. overgeneralization of the "locale" field to the "user-assisted internationalization" idea.

[ironed_orchid]

You forgot about changing "rednecks" to "chavs".

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Actually... translating to UK English can be a nightmare and those of us not from your rainy island (syn:native speakers of UK Eng, id est non-native speakers) tend to f* it up pretty reliably...

Unless you want your dialect implemented via Perl... which would be pretty funny, methinks.