Found in the Twanslation
Gentle readers: The Web is becoming a very polite place. May we suggest messing with someone’s site?
Not that we’d dare encourage hijacking or hacking. That would be too rude. There’s a kinder way to view the Net in your image, through filters and translators.
Wouldn’t CNet (https://www.cnet.com) be ever so much fun if Elmer Fudd was the Webmaster? Then, we’d have categories such as “Hawdwawe Weviews” and news headlines like “Spinway tawgets sewvice to HP customews.”
A little redneck infusion might make the National Review Online (https://www.nationalreview.com) more accessible to the common folk: “This hyar week, NRO follered Go’e v. Bush up t’Boston an’ Lieberman v. Cheney down t’Kentucky, servin’ up commentary on etch debate.”
And how could pig latin not improve an online tour of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (https://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp)?
The above three examples came by way of the Dialectizer
(https://rinkworks.com/dialect), which has a few more dialects to play with.
Of course, there are more legitimate translators on the Web. Babelfish (https://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn) and FreeTranslation.com (https://www.freetranslation.com) are just two sites that will translate either Web pages or text into a number of languages. But really, the only fun you can have there is translating the same text from language to language for your own personal game of “Telephone.”
It took just a few translations to turn “We’ve never seen a green cow. Oh sure, brown and black ones. But green ones are rare. We’d like to see that” into “We saw a cow becoming green never. Surely, they bronzieren and the black colour of the OH -. however the green those are rare. We would like to see this.”
Imagine using something with a plot.
Maybe we’re being too smugly disaffected. Then again, why not “share” our detached irony with the Sarcasterizer (https://www.brunching.com/toys/toy-sarcasterizer.html)?
If that isn’t hip enough, there’s the Mr. T translator at
https://firefly.sparse.org/~mrt. Try it on a subscription site where you’ll be told, “Fool, sign in!”
And while we’re on the ‘80s (as if they ever went away), there’s Valley Url (https://www.80s.com/Entertainment/ValleyURL) which, fer sure, puts a Valley Girl spin on the Web. If it doesn’t do anything to your Web page, you may want to cut back on the times you use “like” and “totally.”
And if you haven’t gagged on retro yet, there’s Smurf the World (https://websmurfer.devnull.net). Oh, for a Teletubbie filter right about now.
For your own personal Jesus-inspired Web page, try Ask Jesus
(https://www.askjesus.org). This one works especially well on news sites where there’s usually plenty of God’s Wrath.
Not into altering Web pages? A number of sites will translate text and e-mails.
The Schwa Translator
(https://www.scanwave.com/and/m11schwa/m26translate/11.htm) will put your e-mails into code, an excellent way to reply to spam.
Wild Cow Publishing has a translator to reverse text at (https://www.wildcowpublishing.com/paranormal/reverse.html). By the way, Paul really isn’t dead.
And the Spammorpher
(https://www.plumb.org/tekmage/Inspire/SampleSM.html) will replace key words in spam that make it even more irritating.
Sick of all this messing around? This frivolity and disrespect? This attitudinal dissing of others’ hard work? Then go to https://www.latimes.com/click and use our favorite filter, the Shredder (https://www.potatoland.org/shredder). Which does exactly as promised.
Have a subject you’d like us to explore or avoid? E-mail click.here@latimes.com. You can find previous Click Here columns at https://www.latimes.com/click.