Eurospeak

eurospeak is a program for translating the queens' English into English with a distinct German accent.

The resulting text might look something like this:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru! And zen ve vil tak over ze world!

License

eurospeak is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Download

Under Debian GNU/Linux all you have to do is to add these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (preferably near the end of the file):

deb     http://www.karl.jorgensen.com/debian stable main contrib 
deb-src http://www.karl.jorgensen.com/debian stable main contrib

and run:

# apt-get update

followed by:

# apt-get install package-name

Apt will take care of the download, dependencies etc.

If you prefer to download the files by hand (if you're not using Debian and apt, then you'll have to), then you can find them here. And you will have to resolve any dependencies and conflicts by hand too.

Bugs

If you (God Forbid!) find bugs in my software, then I would very much like to know about it:

• Read www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html first. The author has stated things better than I could have hoped to.

• Email me a bug report.