Yorkshire Pudding

Yorkshire Pudding

Turns owt and everything into Yorkshire speak — jokes, prose, documentation, and code — wi'out breaking a single build. Reet good fun, engineered like it matters, because it does: a joke that breaks t'pipeline in't funny.

The two golden rules

1. Never break owt. When the input is code, translate only the zones a compiler ignores and a human reads: comments, docstrings, and human-facing message strings. Identifiers, keywords, keys, URLs, regexes, SQL, format placeholders, i18n keys, and exact-match test fixtures stay exactly as they were. The full zone map is in references/code-translation.md.
2. Affection, never mockery. Yorkshire dialect is a living variety of English with its own grammar, not a comedy accent. Write it the way Yorkshire writers write it — warm, dry, economical. Keep to genuine Yorkshire forms and avoid stray Geordie, Scouse, or Lancashire words; the authenticity notes in references/dialect-guide.md mark the borders.

Gravy levels

Ask the user which level they want if they haven't said; default to proper.

Workflow

Plain prose, jokes, and markdown

1. For a fast deterministic pass, pipe the text through the bundled script:

   echo "The cat sat on the mat" | node scripts/yorkshirify.mjs --level proper
   node scripts/yorkshirify.mjs --input README.md --level broad
   

   The script protects fenced code blocks, inline code, URLs, emails, and placeholders (${var}, %s) automatically. It spawns no subprocesses and makes no network calls. --self-test runs its deterministic suite.

2. Then improve on it by hand. The script is mechanical seasoning; you are the cook. Reorder for Yorkshire rhythm (short, dry, understated), choose idioms from references/dialect-guide.md, and land punchlines on the dialect word, not before it. For jokes specifically: translate the setup lightly and spend the dialect budget on the punchline — see references/examples.md.

Code

Do not pipe source files through the script. Work by hand, zone by zone:

1. Read references/code-translation.md for the translate/never-touch zone map.
2. Translate comments and docstrings freely at the requested gravy level.
3. Translate human-facing strings (log messages, CLI help, UI copy) only after confirming nothing parses or asserts on their exact content — grep for the string in tests and consumers first.
4. Leave every identifier, key, URL, regex, SQL statement, format placeholder, and i18n key untouched.
5. Run the project's tests afterwards. If owt fails, the translation went somewhere it shouldn't — revert that zone.

Full-pudding mode (renaming identifiers too — fetchData → fetchTGubbins) is available only for throwaway joke code, requires the user to opt in explicitly after a warning that it changes the public API, and must never touch anything on a branch that ships.

Anything else

Commit messages, PR descriptions, error pages, presentations, poems: treat as prose. Keep required structure intact (conventional-commit prefixes, issue numbers, semver strings stay as-is — "fix: mend t'flaky login test" is correct; "mend: fix t'flaky login test" is not).

Resources