Huh, I had never heard of this, but a quick search revealed a minimal English checker that works with the sample text in the article: https://learnthesewordsfi

Huh, I had never heard of this, but a quick search revealed a minimal English checker that works with the sample text in the article: https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/tools/CheckMinimalEnglish.html https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/tools/CheckMinimalEnglish.h... I couldn't find a minimal English translator online though. The closest are these for simple English, which I hadn't heard of either until addaon's comment here: https://www.simplish.org/conversion/F1618DD6/ https://www.simplish.org/conversion/F1618DD6/ https://www.online-utility.org/english/simple_basic_helper.jsp https://www.online-utility.org/english/simple_basic_helper.j... https://seotoolzz.com/article-simplifier.php https://seotoolzz.com/article-simplifier.php https://ds.gpii.net/learn/accessibility-masterlist/translate-text-simpler-language https://ds.gpii.net/learn/accessibility-masterlist/translate... I feel like if there was a semester class or certification to know how to convert one's language to minimal, and another to know how to convert between minimal languages, we'd be well on our way to being able to communicate with anyone. The alternative is to invent a language like Common in role playing games, and expect everyone to learn it. Unfortunately, that just doesn't work, as shown by Esperanto's lack of adoption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_Wikipedia https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/ https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/ To me, it looks a bit like the Spanish I know, but I can't really read it. Programmers have Lisp and the shell and assembly and SQL and even C-based languages like Javascript that they can fall back to when explaining something. It's been a long time since I looked at a piece of mainstream code and didn't immediately grok what it's generally doing. I feel like there's something to that. For example, I never had to "learn" PHP, because it stems from the context and metaphors used by the shell and C++. If you know how string interpolation works with "$var" and how associative arrays work with $array['dog'] = 'cat', then congratulations, you already mostly know PHP. But I never fully internalized how Ruby works, because it attempts to transcend the commonalities and be its own language, more like Perl maybe. I'm not quite saying that right, but maybe there's a term for that concept. Ruby might be more "expressive" than PHP, which can result in a steeper learning curve. So translating English to Japanese, for example, might be like Python to Ruby, but we'd be better off doing something like Python -> C <-> C++ -> Ruby. That way anyone who knew C or C++ could generally communicate with anyone. But we don't teach (or even have) those common basis languages for communication?