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bytbyt
2011-09-25, 06:08 AM
Anyone know where I can find a site that will allow me to translate English to Aklo?

It can be the Aklo from H.P. Lovecraft or Pathfinder I don't care which

Ravens_cry
2011-09-25, 06:21 AM
Unfortunately, I don't think either, correct me if I am wrong, is anywhere near a constructed language, like Tolkiens Quenya or Star Treks Klingon or even Myst's language of the D'ni people. So you really can't translate something into it as there is no real 'it' to translate to.

bytbyt
2011-09-25, 06:23 AM
It could even be a homebrew construction of the language so long as it sounds and looks good

Analytica
2011-09-30, 04:40 PM
Will you have to re-translate it at some point?

If not, I would just use Google Translate or something like that from English to a language that uses different word order. Then I would swap out all syllables to other syllables (i.e. all "to" becomes "ya", all "th" becomes "kch", etc.). The result should feel suitably alien.

Beleriphon
2011-09-30, 07:33 PM
Will you have to re-translate it at some point?

If not, I would just use Google Translate or something like that from English to a language that uses different word order. Then I would swap out all syllables to other syllables (i.e. all "to" becomes "ya", all "th" becomes "kch", etc.). The result should feel suitably alien.

This is a good suggestion. I'd personally use Latin since the word order is honestly irrelevent, and it already has some odd ball word constructions, but is consistent enough (there are 6 verb exceptions in the whole language) that you can get what looks like a real langauge without the trouble to actually having one.

Yhynens
2011-09-30, 09:07 PM
Will you have to re-translate it at some point?

If not, I would just use Google Translate or something like that from English to a language that uses different word order. Then I would swap out all syllables to other syllables (i.e. all "to" becomes "ya", all "th" becomes "kch", etc.). The result should feel suitably alien.

Th and kch are not syllables... usually.

If you're going with this, I'd use Japanese; it's predominantly SOV order and is actually syllabic (actually moraic, but that's irrelevant) unlike Latin. You have to click the A with the umlaut and look under the grey box to see how to pronounce it, though. Really, it would just be best to use a language you know. You could also just use a substitution cipher from English with an added trick of, say, reversing all the words in a sentence and all the letters in a word. (Remember to substitute vowels for vowels, though, or else you'll get a lot of unpronouncable words.)

My suggestions, though this wouldn't work if you wanted to translate back and forth, would just be to take every line of Aklo present in both sources and write them all down and draw from a hat when you need to. If that's too much (I don't know how much Aklo there is,) just go to a random wikipedia page and click one of the foreign languages on the side and grab a sentence at random. It depends on if you want the language to be pronounceable or not, as well, since you could just mash face on keyboard and people wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. That wouldn't be translatable, either, of course.

If you want a different alphabet, crib it from one of the Rice Boy languages (http://wiki.rice-boy.com/wiki/Writing_systems) since it likely won't be easily recognizable for your players (unlike, Quenya or Dwarf runes, I guess) and they're all pretty well constructed.

Anyway, hope some of that helps.