English to Norwegian Translator     englishtonorwegian


I was recently in Norway and took time to work on Timbre.  While most people there spoke english as a second, I wanted a way to work with and remember the words and phrases I was learning.  I got up early one morning and put together a simple Norwegian/English translator with a few extras.  It is a useful framework to build a language translator upon.  My intent was to help me with everyday phrases and words and ease me into the pronunciation of Norwegian words and the three extra letters.  Just writing the language translator made me more familiar with the language and was the most valuable exercise for me.  In a way it was capturing the way I learned to speak Norwegian and could serve as a learning record.  As my studies progressed, so would the translator.
There are two useful behaviours that I wanted to capture:
    •    enter an english word or phrase and see the norwegian equivalent
    •    enter a word or phrase in english or norwegian and see how it is pronounced in norwegian
The default behaviour is the first one, while the second behaviour can be elicited by preceding the phrase or word with either 'pronounce' or '?' without the quotes.  The dictionary structure uses two rule sets.  One for translation and the other for pronunciation.

Example session run on a Mac OS X terminal with Timbre V.9 installed (output is bold):
$: timbre english2norwegian.tim
English to Norwegian translation
  type words in lower case; press esc to exit
> hello   hallo
> pronounce hallo   hah-loo
> ? monday  mahn-dah
> I don't understand  Jeg forstår ikke
> ? I don't understand  ay fo-shtaw ik-ker
> <esc> bye
$: