Uryuomoco is the language spoken by the Uryuom aliens in the web comic El Goonish Shive. The language was created by Dan Shive, and I take no credit for its creation. The English/Uryuomoco Translator was based on the guide by William McMillian.

Uryuomoco yuc um ozglonori seer rumtauto, umja yuc u gocgunomg geh cho slougyubo tomyuac eh yugc slougel Dan Shive.

This translator is a downloadable version of the online translator.

Using the translator

The English/Uryuomoco Translator comes in two versions, a graphical (GUI) version and a command-line version. If you don't know which you should use, you probably want the graphical version.

Translating text

In both the command line and graphical version, if you wish to have a word appear in the result text untranslated you can enclose the text in square brackets [ ]. So if you provide the input "Gun of [Tedd]" this will result in the Uryuomoco output "Tam eh Tedd". This is particularly useful for names. It works for both directions of translation.

Graphical

You will be presented with a single screen with an input field. Simply type the text you want to translate into that field, use the options in the bottom-left of the screen to select translation direction (English to Uryuomoco or Uryuomoco to English) and other translation options, and then click "Translate".

Sometimes a single word can be translated in multiple ways. When this happens, these words are underlined in the translated text, and you can right-click them to select different alternatives. When the translation is to your satisfaction, click the "Finish" button to continue using the translator.

The amount of words that have alternatives for an Uryuomoco to English translation can be greatly reduced by selecting to use a dictionary to resolve the alternatives.

When doing English to Uryuomoco translation, you can choose to check the spelling of your text before translation. Regions of text that are excluded from the translation by enclosing them in [ ] (as indicated above) will also not be checked for spelling.

You can set additional options and view information about the English/Uryuomoco Translator by clicking the "Options" button.

Command Line

You can select whether to translate from English to Uryuomoco or vice versa, and will then be prompted for input.

When a single word has more than one possible translation, all alternatives are listed in the result text, enclosed in parentheses. For instance, when you translate the Uryuomoco word "seer" (without using a dictionary to resolve the alternatives), the output will be "(chol|cool)", meaning the translation can be either "chol", or "cool".

You can also use the command line version to translate plain text files. For information on how to do this, start the translator by typing TranslatorCmd.exe -? at the command line.

Version History

Version 2.0

• Spell checking for English to Uryuomoco translation (not available in the command-line version).
• Fixed: sometimes not all alternatives would be shown when doing Uryuomoco to English translation if the word ended in "eh" or "ja".
• Improved capitalization matching, including better support for words that are all-caps.
• Performance and reliability improvements.
• Made the change log accessible from inside the application (not available in the command line version.
• Added an installer.
• The application remembers the last used translation options when you restart it (not available in the command-line version).
• Various user interface improvements.
• Fixed: incorrect link to the Uryuomoco guide in the about box.
• Updated to use Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0.

Version 1.4

• Fixed: using certain special characters such as \ or { could cause application crashes or malformed results.
• Improved update notifications allow you to disable notifications for a specific version.
• Improved error handling including error reporting

Version 1.3.1

• Fixed: non-word characters at the start of the text would get stripped after translation.
• Fixed: a word with alternatives that has non-whitespace characters in front of it could not be right-clicked.
• Improved update checking facility provides the user with information about the new version.
• Added update checking to the command line version as well.

Version 1.3

• Fixed: Uryuomoco to English translation was missing certain alternatives when certain combinations of clusters were used.
• Fixed: If more than one alternative in Uryuomoco to English translation is in the dictionary, only the first one was returned.
• Fixed: The main window could be made infinitely small.
• Improved handling of words with apostrophes (contractions like "isn't").
• Completely reworked alternative handling in the GUI version; words can now be right clicked to select different alternatives.
• Command-Line version groups alternatives per word instead of per letter combination (outputs "(cool|chol)" instead of "(ch|co)ol", which creates a more easily readable result).

Version 1.2

• Improved performance when using a dictionary repeatedly.
• Optional automatic update checks.
• Expanded "About" information.
• Added translation for Uryuomoco to the dictionary.
• Gave the application an icon (based on this filler comic).

Version 1.1

• Added support for using a dictionary to clean up results in an Uryuomoco to English translation. The dictionary used is the one provided with NetSpell

Version 1.0

• First release.