Legal note: This is not an official translator! It is not at all affiliated with Universal Pictures or with the Despicable Me series of films.
All thanks for this translator goes to Bryce Dorn the creator of the original minions translator who compiled the word minionese wordlists. The wordlists were published by that creator under the MIT license so I figured I'd make a LingoJam version for people who want to translate large amounts of English to Minion-speak (the original translator only has small input boxes). I encourage you to check out the original though!
Minion Language
The language of the Minions (sometimes called "Minionese" or the "Banana language") in the Dispicable Me series is a mashup of several different languages from all over the world. Spanish, Indonesian and Malay, Japanese, Italian, and several other languages have worked their way into Minion-talk throughout history as the move from one evil-overlord to the next. Some examples of minion words are:
- "para tu" which means "for you" (Spanish)
- "la boda" which means "marriage" (Spanish for "wedding")
- "be wakuf" which means "idiot" (Hindi)
- "c'est par là" which means "this way" (French)
- "petit" which means "little" or "little one" (French)
- "para tutti" which means "for all" (Italian)
Minion Dictionary
The creator of the original minions translator compiled an extremely large dictionary of Minion words. These words are in this file on GitHub, but I've turned it into a file that's a bit easier to read and use. It's available here. It's very impressive and I'm not entirely sure how he did it. I'll leave you to confirm the accuracy of the more unusual words (e.g. word #8608: liquidation = "okadon"? Wow). Again, check out this massive Minion dictionary and let me know what you think.
Minion Translation
In case you're wondering how this thing works, it's just doing a word for word swap. Luckily, Minionese doesn't appear to have any major grammatical differences to English: It still follows the "subject-verb-object" sentence structure. This is great if you're an English speaker because you can just memorise the Minion versions of English words and you're good to go.
That said, there still is some mystery surrounding Minionese. The directors have suggested that the language is not entirely translatable due to words being inserted for aesthetics. Grammar girl did a great article on this here.
In any case, thanks for using this translator, and let me know if there's any words missing so I can improve it!
