MFT: Chef/Jive/ValSpeak/Pig Filter

Text substitution is rather attractive technique from a creative standpoint. You can take any text and transform it into semi-comprehensible slightly deformed wraith of itself and uncover some hidden things of the text in the process. Isn't that great? What is even better is text substitution combined with some elaborate vernacular.

Chef/Jive/ValSpeak/Pig Filter is a kind of translator that makes reading of the text a little bit more complicated and in the same time very entertaining. It is a pure novelty but it can be applied in a more creative ways too. For instance, it is a viable option in terms of creating seething malapropism-riddled verses of nil. Not only the translation disjoints the original text while keeping the form, it also undermines its original meaning by deforming the very words it is expressed with. The resulting text is resembling the original but is considerably deformed and ravaged which makes it different. 

The translator uses general English vocabulary as a foundation and converts it through four sociolect filters: valleyspeak, pig latin, jive talk and swedish chef. All of them are astoundingly bizarre at first. However, without tinkering and creative approach to an input text - the joke gets old after two or three times.

Valleyspeak is the simplest of the bunch and it can be used for slight, less visible sabotaging of the text. The text is not really blasted off. You just get a couple of inserts ranging from "like" and "ya know" to "uh" and "wow!". You also get minimal distortions here there but nothing actively assaulting your perception. If used sparingly over the text, it can act as a form of textual tongue-in-cheek corpsing.

Jive talk is an extremely limited approximation of african-american urban vernacular. AIt can be used as a wham-joke fill, but not much. It doesn't change the text that much aside from chewing parts of the words and occassional inserts of "ha'" and "ah'" with exclamations like "What it is, Mama?". However, it can be useful as a raw material - you can extract chewed parts of the words and random exclamations and construct rather peculiar sound poem out of it.

Pig Latin is a classic dada verbal terrorism. If you need to make the text utterly unreadable celebration of ad lib nihil - then this is the thing to use. It can seriously improve middling text by strong-arming into it many-many much-unneeded suffixes and prefixes and also messing parts of the words around like trash. The resulting text looks like a text that will make you question the nature of comprehension. Which is always a good thing.

Swedish Chef is inspired by an eponymous characters from The Muppets and his signature manner of speak. This filter creates some elaborately ragged and rotten mutations of the common words. At times, it actually manages to make the words indistinguishable which is great. As such, it is best used for more complex words as they tend to be distorted far more deeply. The combination of such distorted words can make a good sound poem.

Translation is probably the single most creative activity one can imagine. You take a piece of text and substitute words from one language or dialect to another. You can just provide direct translation and make an utterly clumsy alienated text and you can thoroughly adapt to the nuances of the other language. In essence, translation can be anything - there are no particular rules especially if you are doing this for your own pleasure and not for some heightened goals of cultural dialogue.