Introduction and Credits

This is a polari version of the King James Bible, produced by the Manchester (UK) house of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Polari - a mixture of French, Italian, Cockney and a whole host of other languages - was once used as an argot in the UK gay community, and has an interesting history in its own right. Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality some years ago it is no longer used as a means of concealing meaning from outsiders. It is, instead, used for its tremendous camp value.

Polari reached its apogee with the inspired script-writing of Barry Took and Marty Feldman in the tremendously popular 1960s BBC radio series Round the Horne.In this, a favourite feature involved "Julian and Sandy" two outrageously camp characters, played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick engaged in a variety of different business ventures patronised by the urbane Kenneth Horne. Much of their dialogue was in high-polari, and up-and-down the UK millions of families tucked in to their Sunday roast, unaware of much of what was being said. Indeed had the BBC management been aware of the meaning of much of Took and Feldman's brilliant writing, the show would have been taken off the air.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international order of gay and lesbian nuns and monks. The UK sisters have always used polari in their ceremonies (and for that matter in everyday use). It is, in fact, quite surprising how much polari has entered mainstream gay language (for example chicken or naff), and in recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in the language, similar to that in Gaelic - although Polari is arguably a living language.

History

Work on the original King James Bible began early in the 17th century, and it has become a watchword for the majesty and power of its language. Vulgarising it by translating it in to Polari would be an act of cultural vandalism akin to translation in to Scots. But good taste has never yet fettered the Sisters' activities, so we did it anyway.

Besides a phrase like Rom 6:23 - For the parkering ninty of kertever is death - has a beauty and majesty all of its very own.

The translation grew from a chance conversation between Sr. Matic deBauchery and Sr. Martini Bianca on Polari and musing about the fact that it should be possible to translate from common English to Polari "using steam" (it should be noted that some of the older sisters have only a tenuous grasp on new technology and personal hygiene). As the sherry flowed, the idea began to take shape, and a desire expressed that such a "steam polyglot" also be connected to the "electric telegraph".

The requirements were then written on the back of an envelope and sent to a group of research nuns based at the Polari Research Endeavour (PRE) at the City University Manchester (CUM) - formerly the Longsight Academy for Wayward Girls.

There a group of crack (addled) polari linguists and computer scientists studied the problem. The solution to which they came was a relatively simple one, involving using a scripting language called perl although this apparently has nothing to do with neckalces.

Essentially, the bible was divided in to its component books, and each of these read in verse by verse and run through a filter written in perl which performed a number of transformations and substitutions on the text based on a set of rules. There are currently a little over 800 rules, so given the 31,000 verses in the bible this requires a total of something like 24,000,000 transformations. Another perl script then formated the polari in to HTML.

This two stage approach has the advantage that tools like diff can be used to check what the translator hath wrought and also the polari files can be easily converted to other formats like troff,PDF or postscript. The difficult bit in all this (other than learning perl!) was defining all the rules of translation and "tuning" them to make the more popular bits of the bible even funnier than they are in the original language.

Useful links

If you are interested in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, check out our website . Alternatively, visit the website of the San Francisco motherhouse

If you are interested in Julian and Sandy there are a number of websites available, but many of them are unavailable for much of the time - I would therefore recommend a Google search and pot-luck.

If you are interested in Polari, again there are several excellent websites available, but I can strongly recommend "Fantabulosa - A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang" by Paul Baker. Some of the definitions it contains have been used in this translation.

Note to the second edition

Work on the first edition was stopped (due to commitments of other - paying - work) and the edition hurriedly put on-line for initial comment by the other nuns. Word soon leaked out, and within a few months there were links to the website from all over the world and the project had already been mentioned on National Public Radio in the USA.

Work on the second edition began when Sr. Matic returned to the convent having been working away for the past year and decided to take a few months off chilling out and re-visiting perl and various other delights. This also coincided with the convent's acquisition of a small supercomputer, kindly donated by the Pablo Escobar centre for linguistic research. The new system, combined with a complete re-write of the translation software from scratch improved the efficiency of translation 150 fold. The original software and hardware could translate the entire text in about 24 hours. It now takes a little over 8 minutes.

Note to the third edition

Following a now familiar pattern, work on the second edition was suspended when other (paying) work came up, and no more was done on the project in well over a year other than produce a special printed and bound version of the first few books of the Polari Bible for the Buxton Festival 2004.

Unforunately, shortly thereafter, the source-files for the project were inadvertently and irrevocably deleted. All that remained was the translated bible available on the Sisters' website. Fortunately, among the files on the website was an (old) version of the translation lexicon, which represents the greatest part of the work of translation.

The third (and hopefully final) attempt at translation was begun in early November, and the software entirely re-written, the lexicon and this introduction having been recovered from the website.

So how's it done?

When the project was first undertaken, I decided upon a number of ground rules.

1. The process would be completely automated from end to end. That is, I would take a raw bible text from the internet and without ever editing it manually, write software which could create the formatted, translated bible from that text.
2. Once finished I would be able just to type make bible.html or make genesis.pdf and from nothing more than:
   • The raw text file
   • The software programs
   • The specified dictionaries which define the rules of translation
   • The makefile defining how to produce seomthing like whatever.pdf
   the system could produce the required result with no human intervention.
3. Ideally, the software should be small, elegant (although I am not in a position to judge) and portable

The portability of perl means that the code should run pretty much anywhere, but it was developed under Fedora Core 4 Linux running on an X86 (32-bit) platform. An obvious limitation on portability would be the availability of Gnu Make, although it would appear that this is available on Microsoft platforms.

The translation takes place roughly as follows:

1. The raw bible text file is "topped and tailed": that is shorn of any prologue or epilogue which is not part of the King James Bible. This is done just using a combination of the Linux/Unix head and tail commands. Were portability ever required outside a Linux/Unix environment, this would be trivially simple to code in perl.
2. This file is then "cleaned-up" such that each verse occupies a single line, multiple whitespace has been removed etc. and a very primitive mark-up applied (a severely limited subset of HTML). During this process an index file is created which contains one line for each book of the bible containing its proper name - e.g. 3 John - the "stem" of any associated file name - e.g. 3john - and the line number at which the book starts
3. This index allows an individual book to be extracted trivially simply as we know where each book starts in the file.
4. A translator does a two-step translation from the soource language (English) to the destiation (Polari) according to rules laid down in various dictionaries. Becuse we want translation to occur in a specific order the dicrtionaries must be processed in order to avoid mistranslation or double translations.
   Also using a two-step process avoids multiple translations and also allows us to do things like word reverals: e.g. "blue" translates to "green" but also "green" translates to "blue".
5. The translated polari files (these could be either individual books of the bible or the entire thing) are then converted to the appropraite format. The first format is HTML, although PDF and DVI are planned.
6. The dictionary files used in the translation are now used to produce a lexicon file, containing each English word or phrase and its Polari equivalent.
7. Finally, this introduction and the index.html file are automatically generated.

I hope you enjoy The Polari Bible. Producing it has been an interesting exercise, and it's taken much more time than anyone could possibly have expected. Thanks are due to: Sr. Martini (Jim O'reilly) for jointly coming up with the idea, fantastic book-binding for the Buxton Festival, and continued support and belief; Srs. Annie (David Martin) and Gypsy (Jez Dolan) and Amy Rosenthal for their enthusiastic support; and my long-suffering partner Ken (OK - I'm going to look for another assignment tomorrow! I promise) for his understanding in what grew from a piqued interest to an obsession.

Look out for the forthcoming Polari Koran and The Book of Common Screech. As mentioned above, good taste has never fettered the Sisters' muse.

Tim Greening-Jackson, (AKA Sr. Matic de Bauchery), Manchester, November 2005

Copyright (C) Manchester (UK) House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence