About Pirate Monkeyness

Past

In 2006, a couple days before International Talk Like a Pirate day (Sept 19th), I was looking at Pirate translators and found that most of them only did a few basic replacements on words. I thought it would be fun to write a more sophisticated version, so I threw something together as a Perl CGI that used a library of regular expressions to do a more clever translation. I had recently gotten a beta version of Dashcode, Apple's new development program for developing Dashboard widgets, so I made a widget to call the CGI and submitted it to the Apple site on International Talk Like a Pirate day.

In the first month, it made it to #4 on Apple's top widgets list with more than 100,000 downloads and also made it to the staff favorites. I was shocked by the response. I ended up making an online version for the website and then made a version people could install on their sites. I also made Yahoo Widget and Google Gadget versions.

When the iPhone SDK came out in 2008, I decided to write some piratey app for the iPhone, but there weren't any books available yet, so figuring anything out at the beginning was a challenge. I wrote a Pirate Insult Generator by modifying Apple's Hello World example, but I really needed to write something from scratch if I was going to submit it to the app store. The next summer, I found a good book that covered everything I needed to get going and, once I was halfway through, I was able to write a clean Pirate Insult Generator from scratch.

Over the years, other people tied into the translator for various reasons. One of the most used was a plug-in for Second Life.

Years later, I partnered with a coworker who wrote a much better version of the iPhone app. The new version included translations and a photo booth where you could add hats and other pirate accessories to your picture. Sadly, the iPhone app is now with Davey Jones.

For many years, the translator and insult generator had been hosted at my former company, Sitemason. Sitemason merged with another service, so I needed to move the site and bring it up to date. With some fancy configuring, I managed to get AWS CloudFront to host the site with the same functionality as before, but with everything new under the hood. I spent some time converting ancient Perl and PHP code into Python running on AWS Lambda and API Gateway. I moved all the assets to S3. I redesigned the site and put a lot into the background parchment so it could seamlessly expand from a gigantic size down to something very tiny and look good at every point. I think it worked well.

In 2024, I did a round of improvements to the translator and insult generator. I compared output of both with GPT-4o, figuring that at some point AI would outdo my efforts. I was pleasantly surprised to see it has not. While many translations are similar, the Pirate Translator more often produces better and more varied substitutions than GPT-4o and the Pirate Insult Generator produces more varied output with none of the questionable, non-piraty insults GPT-4o produces. GPT-4o did help in giving me a lot of ideas and was invaluable in making these latest improvements. AI and humans working together produces the best results.

Future

The translator is my go-to project whenever I want to test out a new technology. Most of those efforts never see the light of day. Possible improvements are using sentence structure to more accurately substitute words and phonemes to more accurately apply the accent. Eventually, AI will make it into the translator and insult generator.