Schtroumpsify is a Twitter bot translating all tweets from the French newspaper Le Monde in smurf language.
It all started with a discussion at the coffee maker: Would it be possible to build an automated translater from French to Smurf?
I decided to give it a try and looked for a use case. I decided to build a bot that will tweet in Smurf every tweet from the French newspaper Le Monde.
I found a French grammatical parser developed by the INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. I built a node application calling a forgotten demo version running on their machines.
They ended up removing the service at some point, killing the bot at the same time.
Later, I started learning Elixir and decided to resuscitate the bot.
I found a docker image of the parser, which was unfortunately really heavy - think 10Gb -, and decided to shrink its size. This was the first part of the revival of the Schtroumpsifier - Schtroumpf is French for Smurf.
Once able to parse French again, I built a Phoenix application displaying the tweets in realtime and automatically tweeting translated news.