simple english

hi-
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 wiki-scipt, for use with the simple english wikipedia.

I know about the failure of machine translation and the challenges of natural language processing, but the thinking is that this project is modest enough that it can succeed. Substituting the word 'change' for the word 'alteration' is fair for every usage of alteration I can think of. The inevitable change in meaning is insubstantial, only of nuance really, especially in the context of ESL learning or aphasia. 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.

Semantic problems Every word is a daughter, each has its own dear history. Because of this, there are no perfect synonyms. I get it.
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.
YesIknowallthisbutshutup.
If an object has one name (across all its uses and users), it will not be translated. This includes words like dolphin and accordion - Pronouns and near pronouns. You can simplify them but it gets ugly, so i've chosen not to. For objects with more than one name I begin translating. While swooping my hand I deny differences between rifle and gun, shrivel and shrink, professor and teacher. I fart all over this language and it's cheeky little distinctions.
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, You know what I mean? Nobody knows. When looked at independently, words become mush. They're senseless. Words. -make, &no.*sense.
But put them in a sentence and they become nervous, bureaucratic.
For every word in a sentence, there's a long, schizophrenic and unreasonable, arbitrary, self referential list of rules concerning the grammatical charcter of the sentence.
A sentence is a guy with wires all over his bedroom. If you take something out and switch it he'll know. He may begin bucking his hips, saliva sweating through the braces of his clenched teeth.
sentences are not cool, And this is what has made creating this program difficult.
In my impressive (and pretend) linguist-ese, the demands on word-substitution translation are as follows:

Requisite synonymity -- (means the same)

homonymic unambiguity -- (one use)

Lexical identity -- (used in same way)
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.