Alien Translator

"my dog ate my homework" went into this alien translator and came out "my glax small fur-servant consumed my assigned learning sheet." Fur-servant. Any dog that fetches slippers would struggle to argue.

Everything gets that treatment, as if a very polite tourist from another galaxy were reading your texts out loud. Paste the alien version back and you get the plain words.

What Does an Alien Translator Do?

It's a rewrite of your message in the voice of a friendly visitor who read every Earth manual on the way here and understood about half. Coffee turns into bitter bean liquid and your phone into the glowing rectangle. Names, times and plans stay exactly as you typed them, so the joke never eats the point.

Earth Things, Alien Names

Earth word	What the alien calls it
coffee	bitter bean liquid
phone	the glowing rectangle
dog	small fur-servant
pizza	flat circle of heated bread with toppings
sleep	the nightly power-down
homework	assigned learning sheet
car	metal ground pod
school	youngling knowledge facility
office	daily labor cube
friend	glax
good	blurn
yes	zorp

Only the last three are invented. Everything else is plain English taken painfully literally, and it changes from run to run, so tomorrow's pizza could be a "heated dough disc."

Zorp, Zorp, Zorp

Version one ended every single line with ", zorp." Coffee, zorp. Homework, zorp. Pizza tonight at 8, zorp! I'd defined zorp as "yes," so the alien was basically agreeing with itself after everything it said, like a nervous intern on a Zoom call.

So I told it: zorp only when someone's actually saying yes. It obeyed, then swapped in other words as tails instead. ", glax." ", blurn." Clever little alien. Another line now bans tacking any alien word onto the end, and it has to use one alien word at most, inside the sentence where it means something, like "my glax Sam." It still sneaks in a "blurn plan" now and then. I've stopped fighting that one.

Pizza got the longest name of the lot. A flat circle of heated bread with toppings is eight words for one, and the alien uses all eight, every time, like it's reading off a menu it doesn't quite trust. I kept it. It makes me laugh each time.

The backwards mode had its own wobble. "Greetings, earthling. My glowing rectangle has run out of power" came back as "Greetings, earthling. My phone has run out of power." It fixed the phone and kept the greeting. Half human, half visitor. I kind of like it.

Out of the Box

What I typed	What came back
i need coffee before my meeting	I require bitter bean liquid prior to my meeting, glax.
lets get pizza tonight at 8	let us acquire a blurn flat circle of heated bread with toppings this night cycle at 8
yes, i'll be there	zorp, my glax I shall be present at the designated location.
my best friend sam is coming over	my glax Sam is coming over, a blurn visit.

See the first one? That glax on the end slipped through even after the fix. I left it in the table because that's what the tool really said.

Where It's Fun

Group chats, party invites, and the sticky note on the office fridge about whose bitter bean liquid is whose, which reads a lot less passive-aggressive when an alien wrote it. Kids could use it for school projects about space. Sci-fi writers could use it to sketch how a visitor might see a supermarket. I'd skip it for anything serious, like a sick note. "My organic self is malfunctioning" won't get you the day off.

It isn't a real alien language, of course. Nobody has one of those yet. Scientists did try saying hello once. In 1974 the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico beamed 1,679 ones and zeros at a star cluster 25,000 light years off. Don't hold your breath for the reply. Wikipedia has the story of the Arecibo message.

Want aliens with a grammar book? The Klingon Translator does real Star Trek Klingon. Squeakier? Try the Minion Translator. The rest of the crew waits on the translators page.

Questions From Earthlings

Is there a real alien language? No. Nobody's met one to ask. Klingon, Na'vi and the rest were all dreamed up for films and TV, by linguists who were paid to.

Can it turn alien talk back into English? Yep. The glowing rectangle turns back into your phone. Greetings sometimes stay a little spacey, which I've grown fond of.

What does zorp mean? Yes. I picked it because it sounds like a spaceship door sliding open, and as far as I know it isn't from any film.

How do you talk like an alien? Take everything too literally. The fridge is the cold food cabinet, a hug is an arm-wrap greeting, and everybody's an earthling.

Can I use it for a story or a school project? Go for it. It's free, there's no signup, and you get 800 characters a go, which is plenty for an alien's diary entry.