[WIP]
This translator takes an input text and outputs something that looks exactly like the output… except it’s not. But how?
This translator is possible because of something called Unicode. To understand Unicode, we’ll first have to go back to 1986. Back then, characters (e.g. E, $, 3) were encoded in ASCII which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The ASCII character set contains 128 characters. 95 of these are printable. A set of 95 characters is enough space to store uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols. The following string contains all printable ASCII characters:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
Note: Some of the characters are replaced with HTML entities. " is a quotation mark, & is an ampersand, < is the less than symbol, and > is the greater than symbol.
Other countries developed similar systems except with their own alphabets. However, a problem arose. If a computer with Greek ASCII tried to view an English document, they wouldn’t see English. Instead, they would see something like this:
|e)2mrI\AGr\5"W90.CE/J/-HZUD^lG/>0L_0tv3&\jW&VW~JV#N%#Z%A}u6zL:$jb'1(o%vu:dIVuCubk1;fO7I=6/uJ@T4]QmcaN/c8&}!- AlfT%\:U+SQG[Qt{m]QNi[;kzl|^f(~yjfE~xS9^T_gON8]W>V+fw#bQ?$IJ}N3i/L"k$+[_P|DM,g`YPO_i5uTXXr!rtP.rcl4n>)#-.^3-+czNa71Uc,qh+Ny@wAVsU!#]wn*7Hp86u+
…instead of the actual text. Extended ASCII attempted to solve this by using 8-digit binary numbers. This doubled the amount of space, and allowed for non-English characters and more symbols. But still, the Greek person could only see the English document as 'wI_JQ>:7{TBD<3F|; 7pcT-zZBUOyFBBnQC}qZp:l"|6KsM9{,RLylHR@NdfijvqF0&x^Gg~ojGs;R%Ol,x2s+(O{0o$2*R_n@ln!3t(;*/!L#fQ;gp*Zz)UoRY( P>bzf6M47H\;KAuA'?_(;L}e6/VI>1.medf{WD(2o<wc[LAB!$9}:g^/Y"'WEv-nU],c1#8)+$wzqWSMtod_!k14"NvvL3{D8>'3KTd\Cr07bN5q%pl}z4O1aoH;==. Unicode solved this problem by using 16-digit binary codes. This was enough to include Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and several more languages, as well as hundreds of special symbols and even a entire Chinese script! This translator uses the extra characters to make your text look exactly the same! (Except it’s not)
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