Orcish Translation Project

[Joe[x86]]

I gave Warrior a nice description.

(18:55:42) [x86] Joe: Anyhow, seeing as how you might be getting WoW, I should bring this up.
(18:55:59) [x86] Joe: You can't understand the horde. They speak orcish, not the common tongue.
(18:56:44) [x86] Joe: Blizzard was fairly stupid, and fairly smart, by using a letter-by-letter translation. Because of this, its very easy to translate back, but it does translate every single word, including ebonics. =(.
(18:57:14) [x86] Joe: I've gotten a little bit of it "reverse-engineered", and I know that the orcish letter K is the common letter L, and the same for E=O.
(18:58:07) [x86] Joe: I've written a VisualBasic function to do this translation for me. I'm still working on getting some more letters translated, but a friend of mine has been working on this since the beginning of beta, I hear.

Questions/Comments? I'll be porting it to C++ in my effort to learn the language. Java isn't native, so I think I'm going to give up on it.

What do I need you to do? When your in the game, take down any orcish words you see people saying, if you think you know what they mean. As an example, I saw an orc say "kek" and his character laughed, so I knew it was "lol".

[K]

I'm pretty sure it's not a straight character-to-character translation. I think it picks from a set of letters randomly for each corresponding letter; ie, if the character is a vowel it will pick another random vowel and substitute.

Not sure.  I don't think the process can be reversed.

[Joe[x86]]

I read the same thing somewhere, but aparently its like hashing. Each character has a value, and it sort of does a little check-revision thing on it, doing operations on it from one characters value to the next, and from the result of the final operation, it picks a word of the right length from a table. A guild mate of mine, Jojo, seems to have gotten some work done on this, so I'll talk to him.

[darkxir]

Too much time on your hands.

[Intangir]

i really wouldnt mind knowing what those bastards are saying

what would be even cooler is if you could speak some garbled stuff and they understood it

[Joe[x86]]

Well, if you say k e k, with the spaces, it will translate into the common garble (like undead see when fighting the scarlet crusade in the starting zone), which just happens to be l o l, again with the spaces.