영어는 크고 어리석다.
대부분의 낱말은 무용하다.

английская язык большая и тупоумная.
большинств слова никудышны.

英语是大和愚笨的。
多数词是无用的。

het Engels is groot en stom.
de meeste woorden zijn nutteloos.

τα αγγλικά είναι μεγάλα και ηλίθια.
οι περισσότερες λέξεις είναι άχρηστες.

el inglés es grande y estúpido.
la mayoría de las palabras son inútiles.

英語は大きく、愚かである。
ほとんどの単語は無用である。

Englisch ist groß und dumm.
die meisten Wörter sind unbrauchbar.

english is big and stupid.
most words are useless.

this application translates regular english into simple english. it is free and open source, it was made by spencer Kelly in 2008, using data from openoffice and Charles Kay Ogden.

It was made to be friendly with the simple english wikipedia.

english is really complicated.

If you are careful. the inevitable change in meaning when you substitute a word is insubstantial. Hopefully it is only nuance, which, especially in the context of ESL learning or aphasia, can be forgiven.
While I'm prepared to be embarrassed to learn otherwise, no project of this kind has been taken on by anywhere - at least anything available freely on the Internet - and that's ridiculous because it was easy to make.

This work was cited by Bo Pang and Dr Lillian Lee in their Human Language Technology Conference paper
the list of translations can be viewed and edited here

Yup, it's pretty brute force.


I'm throwing around three ideas:
  • Word sense disambiguation -- popping homonyms of wordnet. Is 'novel' a 'book' or 'new'? I haven't found a (free) disambiuator that is sufficiently careful.
  • Dependent clause repair -- with POS tagging. Resolving run-on sentences.
  • Manual undo collection-- Ajax feedback. Users click the translated term and it reverts back to its previous form, collect this data to improve problem translations..
    email me.
    • I know there are no perfect synonyms.

    Also, being a person in this world, I know it's through nuance, charm, and character that first language users actually communicate, if at all.
    For every word in a sentence, there's a long, unreasonable, arbitrary, (and self referential) list of rules concerning the grammar of the sentence.
    sentences are not cool, And making even small changes is very difficult.

    If an object has a strong pronoun, like 'dolphin', it will not be translated. For objects with more than one 'soft pronoun', I begin translating. While swooping my hand I deny differences between rifle and gun, shrivel and shrink, professor and teacher.
    I translate the words paternal to fatherly and paternalistic to fatherly, but paternal is usually used in a positive way, but paternalistic in a negative way? at least I think so. Nobody knows. When looked at independently, words become mush. They're senseless. Words. -make, &no.*sense.

    Also, a funny thing is that the translations are not internally consistent. For example, I translate 'large' to 'big', but 'copious' to 'large'. I stand behind this.

    so in summary,

    yes this project is forever flawed, incomplete.

    yes it is stupid to reprimand creative, nuanced english speakers.

    but the complexity of english is unbelievably unfair. It is a serious problem.
    so, this software, despite its problems, should exist. and now it does.

    We find that 90% of the concepts in the (25,000 word) Oxford English Dictionary can be achieved with 850 words. -C Ogden