Thread by @AurekFonts

Translating the X-Wing consoles:

This unnamed script originally appeared in ESB in Luke's x-wing as a transcript of R2D2 on the way to Dagobah. The graphics were reused identically in RotJ.

@BLIND_LTD recreated the script as a font, which they used on consoles in R1 & TRoS. 1/

@BLIND_LTD The first stage of this project was of course locating every usage to see what we can learn about how many letters their are and whether common clusters appear.

In this case, where the letters are so fuzzy, having a large sample size helps to pin down how the letters are 2/

@BLIND_LTD *supposed* to be shaped, regardless of individual distortions in a single use-case.

So here is my compilation of every known usage:

A few are screengrabs, but most come from production photos shared by @BLIND_LTD .

I've separated material from the Original Trilogy from the 3/

@BLIND_LTD Disney era, because most on-screen text in alien languages in the Original Trilogy is non-translatable gibberish. I don't want to waste my time trying to decipher something that is probably nonsense.

The work by @BLIND_LTD on the other hand is probably at a least key-mapped 4/

@BLIND_LTD font. While their screens are sometimes encoded/nonsensical, they also sometimes translate back into english.

So that's where I'm at. Gonna to try to translate the modern texts, see what they reveal, then create a font based on their mapping.

Let me know if you wanna help~ 5/5

@BLIND_LTD Well, this is embarrassing -- I thought that this script wasn't used in TLJ, but it was actually used several times!

I've added them below, AND discovered the first breakthrough for translation:

6/

@BLIND_LTD Now the breakthrough comes on this screen, where Leia watched the humanoid cost of Poe's attack run on a Dreadnought --

Icons indicate whether fighters have been destroyed, and labels at the top... Seem to be keeping tally of the remainder...

original: blindltd.com/the-last-jedi

@BLIND_LTD Now if we take those tallies and compare them with the remaining fighters, we would get the following:

"Bomber 0"
"X wing 5"
"A wing 3"

7/

@BLIND_LTD It does look like 3 letters, which could mean:

1) Abbreviation: the G got dropped (ie "X Win")

2) Digraph: "NG" is represented by a single, like it used to be in Aurebesh

3) Spacing: It is two letters

But we don't yet know enough to say which. 8/

https://twitter.com/DecafKauffee/status/1276682864717856769

@BLIND_LTD Here is each option visualized:

1) Abbreviation

2) Digraph

3) Spacing

9/

@BLIND_LTD For now, I'm going to guess that they abbreviated. The only way to find out is to pick a hypothesis and see what it yields when we try to use it to translate.

So here's our working model of the alphabet:

We have 9 letters so far. Nice!

10/

@BLIND_LTD Whoops! Yep, missed it. 10 characters!

https://twitter.com/DecafKauffee/status/1276718223229100034

@BLIND_LTD So this was the next clue, in an image from Rise of Skywalker - it seems to be displaying a waveform. Context clues are indispensable at this stage of decoding the cipher, because it allows us to focus our search on the relevant information.

It may fail, but we might- wait.. 11/

@BLIND_LTD Does that say..? in the bottom right..?

Yes, it seems to say "INC AUDIO," except some letters are flipped relative to what we saw before, which I'm guessing means a difference in capitalization.

While we're here, the other translatable line is "Purge Set" 12/

@BLIND_LTD So our current hypotheses are:
- The letters we have identified are correct
- Letters may be flipped or rotated to indicate capitalization, but they are the same letters.

Let's see how these hold up... 13/

In this screen from The Last Jedi, we get a rare comparison with Aurebesh.

On center right, in Aurebesh, it reads "VEC" short for "vector" no doubt.

On far left, we have what looks like "VEC", except didn't we id that as "A" before?

New hypothesis: A and V are identical
14/

The next word in the above image would seem to be "INIT", short for "initialize," adding a "T" to our collection.

15/

With our growing list of identified letters, we can start to play hangman:

This one says:

"-TA- ON TAR-ET"

16/

Which would be a little harder to solve if it weren't a clear reference to the attack run on the Death Star:

"STAY ON TARGET"

Which gives us S, Y, and G to work with. Nice!

17/

Now that we know what "G" looks like, we can say with certainty that the word "WING" was abbreviated to "WIN" on the first screen.

On the same screen, we get yet another block of text, which to my memory doesn't look like a quote from a previous movie, sadly.

We've got 3 letters here that we don't know, and 2 of them are used twice.

"NE-T SCANNER -IELD
O-EN -RO-Y CLUSTER"

18/

Since we know the letters W and Y, we can say pretty certainly that the word "-IELD" should be "FIELD".

Likewise, "O-EN" probably isn't "OVEN" or "OWEN", so I'll say "OPEN", which also turns "-RO-Y" into "PRO-Y".

The last letter is where things get complicated - not because 19/

it's terribly difficult to guess, but because it challenges one of our hypotheses.

The remaining letter is probably X, giving the translation
"NEXT SCANNER FIELD
OPEN PROXY CLUSTER"

The trouble is, we already identified a different character as X... 20/

So what to do? This isn't a flipped character, so are there two options for writing x?

I don't think so. Repetition legitimizes. Repetition legitimizes. So I am inclined to say that "NEXT" and "PROXY" are correct, since they use the same letter for X and that "X WIN" is 21/

wrong.

But wrong in what way? Well, my current hypothesis is that it was a simple typo. Typos are harder to catch when you're writing in an alien alphabet. The nearest letters to X on most keyboards are: A, S, D, C, & Z.

Since we know 4/5 of those, my guess is that the

22/

character we originally identified as X is actually Z.

And this is a good place to pause and recap with a new alphabet chart.... 23/

Here's what we think we know so far:
- Letters can be flipped and rotated based on capitalization,
- There's a pretty strong resemblance between characters in this alphabet and the Latin alphabet.
- We have identified 22 letters so far, but we should be open to being wrong.

24/

And here's a version with my educated guesses that bring us up to 25/26 characters

Red = supported
Orange = speculation

Since this is getting a lot of attention, thanks to @PhilSzostak 's helpful retweet, this is as good a time as any for an ad break:

I run a Star Wars font archive at aurekfonts.github.io

If you like what you see, you can support the project at ko-fi.com/aurekfonts

@PhilSzostak Given that we have a pretty good sense of the alphabet now, even though it's incomplete, it's time to start working out the specifics of the orthography.

Most of the screens are blurry enough that it's hard to say. Luckily, this one is quite clear: 26/

@PhilSzostak It looks like we've got 2 primary widths - one for vertical and one for horizontal lines.

Many scripts (including Aurebesh) were built out of existing fonts originally. I wonder if this one was as well? Probably a question for @daveaddey? 27/

@PhilSzostak Aside: New followers if you are enjoying the X-wing translation thread, you may also enjoy my Jedi Texts translation thread:

https://twitter.com/AurekFonts/status/1250875780134912001

I think these are the rough shapes of the capitalized letters, though for many of them, it's hard to say, and for a few I am absolutely guessing.

Now does anyone have any questions while I take a break?

28/