The Phrasemaker

Speaker:

Listener:

The Phrasemaker is a language translation workshop for World of Warcraft. It allows you to construct phrases that make sense to the opposite faction (i.e. Alliance/Horde).

Instructions:

Using the buttons above, pick a language your character knows.
Click on the words in the right to try and make a meaningful sentence.
In-game, type what is contained under speaker. Any character who doesn't know the language will hear what is said under listener.

For example:

Let's assume you have a character called Ham that speaks Gnomish.
Click the Gnomish button above.
Click on the words "i" "am" "so" "weird" in that order.
The phrase "e jj bb aback" appears under the speaker section.
Go into World of Warcraft and change your language to Gnomish (use the button next to your chat window).
If you were to type "/say e jj bb aback" in World of Warcraft, those around you who don't know Gnomish (including all Horde characters) would see "Ham says: [Gnomish] i am so weird".
Characters that do understand Gnomish will just see "Ham says: [Gnomish] e jj bb aback".

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Phrasmaker FAQs:

I can't say anything with these words! Why are they so limited?
That's the limitation of the language system, and there's no way around it. It can take imagination and cunning to construct meaningful phrases, especially with some of the "drier" languages.

Someone from the opposite faction said something to me. How do I use this tool to understand what was said?
You can't. The Phrasemaker lets you say things to the opposite faction. Not the other way around. In fact, given the way the language system works, any attempt to understand the enemy faction's speech is very difficult because it requires a lot of guesswork.

I've picked up a phrase from elsewhere, but when I construct the same phrase here I'm supplied with different words to use. Why?
Many different speaker words translate into the same listener word. There's more than one way to say the same thing. The choices for speaker words used on this page are largely arbitrary.

I've made a few phrases I like here, but it's a pain to manually swap languages to say them. Is there a better way?
Yes. Make a macro along the lines of this:
/script SendChatMessage("Ee Ff d ", "say", "troll");
Replace "troll" with the language you're using. Replace "say" with "yell" or "party" as required.

Some languages look identical on this page. Common is the same as Gutterspeak, and Darnassian is the same as Thalassian. Is this a mistake?
This is not a mistake. These languages happen to share the same translation properties.

Language Facts and Myths:

Fact: Capitalisation is retained in translation.
This is correct. For example, "glean" translates to "wassa" and "gLeAn" translates to "wAsSa".

Myth: Punctuation is unaffected by translation.
Not true. In reality, all punctuation is removed in translation. This makes it impossible to use smilies, amongst other things.

Myth: Numbers are unaffected by translation.
This is untrue. In reality, numbers are treated like letters. "123" will be translated like any other three-character-word.

Myth: Spacing letters out one-by-one will allow the other faction to understand what I say. For example, "H E L L O".
This is wrong, even though many people seem to believe it. The other faction simply will see a series of gibberish, spaced out one letter at a time.

Fact: The opposite faction can understand my emotes (e.g. /smile, /love).
This is largely true, though see the point below...

Myth: I can use custom emotes (e.g. /em or /me) to communicate with the opposite faction.
Wrong. If you perform a custom emote, the other faction sees it as "Player performs strange gestures."

Myth: I can use custom emotes to communicate with the opposite faction, if I mind control the person I wish to speak to first.
Not anymore. This was fixed. Now mind control has no special effect on custom emotes.

Myth: Languages are perfectly reversible. If I repeat the gibberish someone says to me back to them, it will make sense.
Wrong. You'll just be speaking more gibberish.

Did you find The Phrasemaker useful? Share it!

Thanks go to Alias and Project Azeroth, as they were helpful resources during the development of this page.

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