Unheimlich / Ulysses Translation

[jlee50]

About the project
Unheimlich is a tool that swaps upper and lower case letters with alternatives from a table. Swapping with alternatives that have a similar phonetic quality creates an output that reads like a new language. There are at the same time enough qualities leftover from the source text to retain a degree of familiarity.

About the book
The novel here has only a subtle alteration. While testing different letter swaps I found one that had an Irish accent with a twist of the North to it. I live in the UK, and the flow of goods and people across the Irish border is currently a sticking point in the negotiations for the UK to leave the European Union. There's a lot of concern about this because decades of sectarian violence between the North and South were (mostly) resolved by the Good Friday Agreement. Perhaps this is why it was an obvious experiment to infuse a major novel about Dublin with a touch of Armagh? A kind-of-unification in language. Curiously, the 'translation' here is from a source (James Joyce's Ulysses) that has disputes over which edition is authentic. Furthermore, Ulysses is best-known for its invented words and unreadability, so this new edition adds an extra layer. My proof-readers have confirmed, though, that it gets easier to read as you get into it.
***Update 18 Nov: recently noticed that the original translation was of half the novel. It was an old file on my hard drive, and I don't know why it was only halved. Incidentally, Amazon discovered from readers' Kindles that Ulysses is the most half-read book! Anyway, here's the full translation ***
translation Ulysses aeou full.txt

About the code
Hopefully it's understandable to anyone unfamiliar with C programming. I used a dynamic array rather than pointers and Malloc to help with this. Languages that are more adept with Unicode could extend the capabilities to accented vowels. Being Anglophone, I couldn't comment on what effect such swaps would have. Maybe it's one of several variations that someone else would want to try?
Unheimlich C Source.docx

[hugovk]

Nicely done! Reminds me a bit of reading Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.

---

Here's a preview:

Henging ufar tha bluudy pepar with Elv luuking vur spicy bits instaed
uv ettanding tu tha ganarel poblic. Pictora uv e botting metch, trying
tu creck thair bluudy skolls, una chep guing vur tha uthar with his
haed duwn lika e boll et e geta. End enuthar una: Bleck Baest Bornad
in Umehe, Ge. E lut uv Daedwuud Dicks in sluoch hets end thay viring
et e Sembu strong op in e traa with his tungoa uot end e bunvira ondar
him. Gub, thay uoght tu druwn him in tha sae evtar end alactrucota end
crocivy him tu meka sora uv thair jub.

—Bot whet ebuot tha vighting nefy, seys Nad, thet kaaps uor vuas et
bey?

—I’ll tall yuo whet ebuot it, seys tha citizan. Hall opun aerth it is.
Raed tha rafaletiuns thet’s guing un in tha pepars ebuot vlugging un
tha treining ships et Purtsmuoth. E valluw writas thet cells himsalv
Disgostad Una.

[jlee50]

Hi Hugo

Good point. I vaguely remember someone else recommending it so I shall give it a try. There's also 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James. I'm told it's slow going.
Unheimlich arose from writing a filter in my usual code, so it's been fun to use it on an entire book. I left in the original swap table too - it converts English into what can read as a mix of native American, Slavic tongues, and Latin.
Incidentally, I'm working on a generated non-fiction title about the history of cut-up techniques. It'll be a print book on Amazon. Just search on Madonna Autobiography and you can preview what I do. I'm hoping to find enough material to include NaNoGenMo. If you have a list of links to articles then I'll gladly include what I can (with the caveat that the AI ultimately decides from what I collect). The chapters go from Dada to William Burroughs and other well known subjects. But I want to do as much as possible on digitally produced literature. Serious literature and its criticism largely treats the greatest revolution in 200 years as though it isn't happening.
Thanks for running NaNoGenMo.

[hugovk]

Sounds interesting!

Issue #2 has links to press and other coverage, and also links to the same issue for earlier years.

Also, @zachwhalen has a BIG archive of NaNoGenMo novels (#32):

As you may know, I've started a bit of research on NaNoGenMo, which includes a catalog (i.e. some basic metadata) of every completed entry since 2013, as well as an archived copy of the full text, if I could get it.

All told, that's 382 novels that I have the full text of, which all together contain about 45 million words.

[jlee50]

Great, thanks! Pull a few things. Varied sizes and densities there - will see what I can do.

[janelleshane]

This is so fun! Highlights how little English spelling has to do with its pronunciation sometimes.

[jlee50]

Glad you like it. I seem to remember from language lessons that some onamatapoeic words are spelled differently in French. Probably so for other languages too. Strange when they're the same sounds. Presumably 50,000 Woofs would make no sense in some countries.