Eridian Translator

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What is this?

Eridian Translator is a browser-based translator between Earth languages (English and Korean) and the fictional Eridian language spoken by Rocky, the alien engineer in Andy Weir's 2021 novel Project Hail Mary. In the book, Rocky's species communicates not with phonemes but with simultaneously sounded musical chords — every word in their language is a different combination of frequencies played together. Ryland Grace, the human protagonist, builds a software dictionary on his laptop to translate between English and Eridian. This site is a playable, audible tribute to that dictionary.

How translation works

Type or paste an English or Korean sentence. The translator tokenizes the input and looks up each word in the Eridian dictionary. Words that have a dictionary entry play their assigned chord — typically a triad or four-note cluster, with the precise frequencies and duration drawn from the entry. Words not in the dictionary fall back to a letter-by-letter spelling: each letter is itself a small chord, so an unknown name like "Ryland" plays as a sequence of six brief triads. Three playback speeds are offered: Learn (slow, good for tracing each chord), Rocky (the book's natural pace), and Warp (fastest).

Korean input handling

Korean tokenization is harder than English because Korean attaches grammatical particles directly onto nouns and verbs (조사). For example, "도와" can mean "help" (도와) on its own, or it can be the noun "도" with the particle "와". The translator first attempts a raw lookup, then progressively strips common particles until a dictionary match is found. This keeps short sentences readable while still resolving particle-bearing tokens correctly.

Browser audio under the hood

Chords are synthesized live in the browser using the Web Audio API — there are no audio files to download. Each chord is built from sine oscillators at the specified frequencies, summed and shaped with a short attack-release envelope. Sentences can be exported as a WAV file by re-rendering the same scheduling routine through an OfflineAudioContext, then encoding the resulting buffer with a custom WAV writer. The exported file is sample-identical to what you hear during live playback.

Features

Bidirectional translation: Earth → Eridian and Eridian → Earth.
Live chord visualizer that highlights the currently playing word.
Browseable dictionary of every word, grouped by category, each with a play button.
Composer mode: build phrases by playing chords on a virtual piano (Eridian → Earth).
WAV export of any rendered sentence.
Shareable links that pre-fill the sentence and generate a per-share social preview image.

Credits

Project Hail Mary is a novel by Andy Weir, published in 2021 by Ballantine Books. This translator is an unaffiliated fan project for educational and entertainment purposes — it is not endorsed by Andy Weir, the publisher, or Amazon MGM Studios (the studio adapting the book for film). Built with React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Zustand, the Web Audio API, and Vercel Functions.