Russia's Top Search Engine Yandex Launches Elvish Translation Service

The largest Russian search engine Yandex can now translate to and from Sindarin, a fictional language spoken by Elves in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.

Those who watched the Lord of the Rings series remember hearing Elves talk to each other in their own language. Fortunately we had subtitles underneath to understand what the Elves were talking about.

Now with the help of Yandex one can learn to understand Elvish. The Russian internet company that operates the most popular search engine in the Russian-speaking world launched the translation function from Elvish to mark Tolkien's birthday.

Sindarin is written in Tengwar, an ancient Elvish alphabet. Tolkien, apparently, based some of the grammar and phonetics of Sindarin on Welsh and other Celtic dialects. The fictional language was also influenced by Old English and Old Norse, spoken by inhabitants of present-day Scandinavia more than 1,000-years ago.

Yandex launched its translating service in full beta-version in June of 2012. At that time the service only had three available languages — English, Russian and Ukrainian. Since then, Yandex expanded its translating service to 66 different languages.

What's next? Should we expect Yandex to include Troll and Orc grunts any time soon?