General Questions

This section should hopefully answer any general questions you have about The Voices of Many. If not, your question may be in the "Technical Questions" page, or maybe no-one has asked it yet. If it's a new question, please head over to our contact page where you can email us.

General Questions Answered:

1. Why have you done this?
2. So what's the point? Humour?
3. I'm a webmaster but I don't want your site translating my work. How do I do this?
4. Was it your idea?
5. Help, I can't hear anything!
6. Do you make any money out of it?
7. What languages are supported?
8. Isn't this a breach of copyright, downloading other websites?
9. How long does it take to make new voices?
10. What is the most difficult part to making a new voice?
11. What new voices are you currently working on?
12. What's with the "Take Back The Web" icon?
13. What's Thunderbird?

1. Why have you done this?
   Well, it started off at the start of September 2005 when I was bored and looking for something interesting to do. I saw a couple of other sites out there like this (the links page has a few of them) and thought I could do at least as good a job of it. So I set about trying to do it.
2. So what's the point? Humour?
   Well, essentially, humour is behind it. Elmer Fudd & Sylvester the Cat, for example, are humourous dialects if you know the original characters. And because it was an interesting example of machine translation from a language which a computer cannot possibly understand at this time.
3. I'm a webmaster but I don't want your site translating my work. How do I do this?
   Well, if you don't want The Voices of Many to read your site at all, there are several ways you can do this. The removals page contains all the details you need. (As ever, any questions, please use the Contact page)
4. Was it your idea?
   Sadly, no. I was primarily influenced by RinkWorks' Dialectizer. However, some of the things I do here are my idea, and the implementation definitely is. Though whether that's a good thing still remains to be seen.
5. Help, I can't hear anything!
   Unfortunately, the site doesn't actually speak the words it translates, it simply rewrites the text to be how you would say it. I apologise if the site misled you in this respect, it really wasn't meant to. I was just trying to keep in with the whole "voices" theme... That said, I am trying to come up with a feasible way of implementing it, and as soon as I have results I'm actually happy with (and not a HAL-9000-on-depressants clone), I'll deploy it on the live site.
6. Do you make any money out of it?
   Well, once upon a time, the answer was:

   No. I'm not sure I plan to either, although I suspect I'd have to make some deal with an advertiser if I did. I suppose time will tell, and it does depend heavily on bandwidth usage. Certainly for the forseeable future, this site will remain free.

   Now, unfortunately, the bandwidth usage has got to the point where a little revenue wouldn't hurt. I still fund the costs from my own pocket, however.
7. What languages are supported?
   English. And American English (whatever that is). I support only English partly because I'm not fluent in any other language (except maybe 'rubbish'), but mostly because the site primarily deals with translating English words to corrupted English ones, based on a set of rules whose primary inspiration is skewed pronunciation (e.g. Elmer Fudd). Such things would still run on non-English sites (although any accented letters and symbols will be left alone) Things like Japanese and Chinese will probably be very messed up, due to the lack of handling of 'multibyte characters', where two bytes of information define a character, as opposed to the normal one.
8. Isn't this a breach of copyright, downloading other websites?
   The short answer is no, because it is covered by the definition of "parody", which is considered fair use. Please see our page on copyright, which is here.
9. How long does it take to make new voices?
   As long as it takes. Some voices, like Morse Code took about 15 minutes to program. Elmer Fudd took, from initial test through to current version (v. 3), about 6 hours to write, but it took about 6 weeks over which time I learnt all about regular expressions and made it much faster, more accurate and more compact than the original.
10. What is the most difficult part to making a new voice?
    There are two things which make each voice uniquely different, and often awkward to program. The first, and probably most important, is getting the sense of the voice in your mind when writing and boiling it down into simple rules for a computer to follow. Let's take Elmer Fudd as an example. The first thing I did was to watch some cartoons and essentially listen to his unique dialect. Having done that, I realised that it all centered around the 'r' and 'l' sounds, not the letters themselves. After that, it's just a case of looking at words in general, maybe a passage from a book, or a website (I tend to use the front page of kissmyfaerie.org) and seeing what combinations of letters produced those sounds. I found very quickly that l and r sounds only came when the letter was preceded and/or followed by consonants. It's a bit more than that, but that's the basis for it. The second thing is more a matter of taste on my part: case preservation. When I started doing research on other websites which offered web filtering, I realised one of the major drawbacks (actually commented on by one author as a bug in his translator) was preserving case. I had even noticed in some translations that uppercase (ALL LIKE THIS) and capitalised (Like this) could confuse them, and decided that in this website I wouldn't have that. However, I can't program in every combination of case, so I take a common sense approach. Why not every case? Well, for a 3 letter word, there are 8 combinations of case possible (abc, abC, aBc, aBC, Abc, AbC, ABc, ABC). For every extra letter you add in, this doubles. So, 16 permutations for a 4 letter word, 32 for a 5 letter word and so on. Consequently, I take the view that if the first letter is lowercase, the whole word is. Then I look at the first two letters together. If both are capitalised, the whole word probably is, but if the first is and the second isn't, chances are it was only the first letter in the first place. The only thing with this approach is that for most elements of the translation, it adds 3 rules.
11. What new voices are you currently working on?
    Well, that will change as time goes on, especially if I get new ideas and thoughts. The status page will let you know what voices are on the way by the percentage completed on some of them (anything at 70+% will likely be added very soon).
12. What's with the "Take Back The Web" icon?
    That's one of the slogans of Firefox, an openly developed web browser that lets you take back the web and let you browse it and control it the way it was meant to be. I really like Firefox and shamelessly plug it.
13. What's Thunderbird?
    Thunderbird is an email package, developed by Mozilla, the same people who brought you Firefox, above. Also, like Firefox, it's rather cool and lets you control your email. You can also bring in RSS feeds and more.