> >At the very least, can it be proven to pre-date Google's translator? Is it possible that Google's translator is based on the Dialectizer?
>
> The Dialectizer started April 1998, Google in September of that year. As for the second question, I don't think there's much doubt that Google's Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, and Hacker are originally from RinkWorks. Pig Latin is a maybe.

The legal notice at the bottom of the Dialectizer's main page provides some details about the origin of the various dialects. Elmer Fudd and Swedish Chef are both open source software that predate the web. Google and I are both, I'm sure, using the same source code, although the HTML parsing code would be different, as that wasn't in the original code.

Hacker is something I wrote from scratch; Google's is a completely different code set that produces similar but different results. Pig Latin was also something I wrote from scratch and never distributed, but of course that one would produce very similar if not identical results regardless of the code base.

To answer Monkeyman's question, I remember there being somewhere around five or so pages that do basically what the Dialectizer does before the Dialectizer came into being. Only one had a comparable selection of dialects, which were (IMHO) mostly weak. The others seemed to only offer one and were HTML-adapted versions of previously existing public domain translators. I think the Dialectizer caught on partly because of the Redneck dialect being exclusive, partly because the site itself simple and unadorned (even more pages back then than now featured chains of animated gifs and backgrounds that made text hard to read), but largely due to blind luck.