So I Built a Fake French Accent Translator

Some weekends I get a little bit distracted with silly little projects. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last weekend on such an endeavour: the Authentic Silly French Accent Translator.

Right about now you’re probably wondering why I would go to such ludicrous lengths to build an interface that takes perfectly good English and then transforms it into gibberish that when read aloud sounds a little bit like a French accent. Good question! There’s method to my madness.

You see, I write stories as a hobby – in particular, web comics (you might have noticed the link at the top of the page there). There is a character in a story I am currently working on who specifically speaks in a French accent that sounds like a British person doing a bad impression of a French person. It is supposed to invoke the good old British tradition of having a laugh at funny foreign accents – in particular, the funny foreign accent of one of my all-time favourite comedy characters, Inspector Clouseau (the Peter Sellers version, not the Steve Martin one¹). Another example of this fine tradition would be the WW2-era sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo.

The thing is, it’s very difficult to phonetically write in a French accent. Normally if I need to write in “authentic” (i.e. over-the-top) Scottish or Irish or the like, I find a random dialect converter like the Dialectizer. However, as sod’s law has it nobody has ever thought to make one for French accents. So in order to save myself copious amounts of time in the future, I thought I’d sit down and code a silly accent translator. You’re probably thinking it was a long way to go to solve a problem that’s not really a problem. You’re probably right, but I built the bloody thing anyway alright?

Version 1 of the translator is up and ready for people to play with. It’s not a particularly sophisticated bit of kit – it’s looking for general patterns and doing a “find and replace” on them. A linguist could have probably grouped together common patterns more easily but I don’t have access to one. I’ve intentionally made the replacements as outlandish and silly as possible, and the translator even dots random ‘é’ characters throughout just to make it look a little more authentic. I will probably make amendments now and then as I write dialogue for the character I’m writing for, but feel free to copy and paste swathes of text into it for the sheer giddy thrill of reading it in fake French².

Something I might try and do in the future is adapt the translator to read web pages and convert them to fake French. I just need to figure out the means of doing so and the legal implications! I may also need to produce a silly German dialect translator at some point for a couple of other characters I have.

Any bugs or advice on improvements, leave a comment below! You can login with Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Disclaimer: as stated in the footer of the translator itself, I actually have nothing against the country of France and its people, this is just a bit of fun and if anything this is actually a poor reflection on the British for getting their kicks out of mocking the French accent.

P.S. If ever you wondered what the code behind a silly French accent translator looks like, check out the image below that I shared on Facebook!

I don’t write all my code with derogatory comments, honest…all right, I might do it 80% of the time.

Postscript (05/11/2015)

Someone in the comments suggested I should upload the code behind this to GitHub. I thought I had already, but I hadn’t. So I did. Fork away! If you do anything with it, please let me know! It’ll be nice to see what other folks can do with it.

Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | November 16, 2014 at 10:01 pm | Projects, Technology | 4 comments

Tags: 'Allo 'Allo, French, I have way too much time on my hands, Inspector Clouseau, Peter Sellers, silly accents, The Pink Panther, translator, writing