Vulgarlang’s Pro version Translator is capable of accurately translating most simple sentences into your conlang using the correct word order and grammatical inflection (i.e. the affixes in your conlang’s grammar tables). See below for a list of grammatical features that the Translator can accurately translate. It may struggle with more complex sentences, as well as incomplete sentences. If it can’t parse the sentence, a “Word-for-word translation” notice will appear.
There is also an option to click Turn off Smart Translator and effectively manually type your sentence in your conlang’s word order and manually apply grammatical affixes to word (i.e. writing the sentence is a “gloss” translation format). For Basic version users, this manual style translation is the only option.
Using names in the Translator
You can capitalize the first letter of any proper noun (a.k.a. names) in the Translator. For example “Gandalf used his magic” not “gandalf used his magic”. This stops you from having to add names to the dictionary (dictionaries are not for names!). Additionally, all words in a title needs to capitalized: “Gandalf The Grey” not “Gandalf the grey“. Because of this, it is best practice to not capitalise the first letter in a sentence if the word is not a proper noun, for risk of it getting confused and thinking the capitalized word is a name.
One relatively minor issue is that proper nouns may be given incorrect spellings due to the Translator treating the proper noun input as IPA. For example, the name John will be rendered in IPA as /john/, and auto-generated languages will spell /j/ as y, producing the spelling yohn. However the Breakdown of Sentence will still say John.
Grammatical features that work in the Translator
Nouns
- Number: singular, plural
- Gender: masculine, feminine, neuter, and custom genders
- Possession: possessive, possessed
- Definiteness: definite, indefinite
- Case: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive
Verbs
- Tense: past, present, future
- Aspect: progressive/continuous, perfect, perfective
- Mood: imperative, conditional
- Voice: active, passive
- Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd
- Number: singular, plural
- Gender (of the subject noun): masculine, feminine, neuter, and custom genders
Adjectives
- Comparison: comparative, superlative
- Number: singular, plural
- Gender: masculine, feminine, neuter, and custom genders
- Definiteness: definite, indefinite
- Case: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive