The following was published in No, Robot No! by Sidekick Books in October 2018, alongside a selection of curated ‘wisdom’.

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# hawaiian wisdom a project by ollie palmer
# this entire page is executable python code and can be
# downloaded from hawaiianwisdom.olliepalmer.com
# =====================================
# in february I came across a blog post which described an odd
# effect inside google translate. typing random strings of vowels
import os, json, random # into search bar results in google
# interpreting this text as belonging to the hawaiian language.
from google.cloud import translate # it seems that in order for
# the search giant google to translate from hawaiian, a language
ancient_wisdom = translate.Client() # considered critically
# endangered by unesco, it first strips away most consonants,
letters = [‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, ‘ ’ ]
# preferring to work with a string of
# vowels. hawaiian itself only has thirteen letters, including the
# five vowels we use in our latin alphabet, as well as a series of
# dipthongs that can be created by combining different vowels.
def impart_wisdom(): # but the reasoning behind the choices
    input_phrase = ‘’ # reset the phrase # made in the logic of a
    for i in range(random.randint(50,300)): # search engine’s
        # translation software is perhaps less interesting than the odd
        # effects it gives. random strings of vowels create translations
        # akin to ancient wisdom, seemingly from nowhere, using the
        input_phrase += random.choice(letters) # pseudo-hawaiian
        # input to retrieve advice about love, life, family, happiness,
        # and, most often, the efficiency of coefficients. this is
        # demonstrable without 37 lines of code. typing the string
        # ‘uaaua’ into the familiar box of translate.google.com, we get
        # ‘easy’. adding one ‘o’ to the end of our input results in
        # ‘wisdom’, two result in ‘anxiety’, whilst three give us ‘softness’.
    translation = ancient_wisdom.translate(input_phrase, target_language=’en’)
    # less than 0.1% of the 1.226 million population of
    advice = json.dumps(translation).encode(‘utf8’) # hawaii spoke  
    legible = json.loads(advice) # its own language in 2001. what do
    with open(‘wisdom.txt’,’a’) as file: # google’s forays into translation
        file.write(legible[‘input’]+‘\n’+legible[‘translatedText’]+‘\n\n’)
for j in range(50): # tell us about our relationship with languages?
    impart_wisdom() # in the future i imagine hawaii, seceded from
# the united states, where the population has re-learnt its native
# language from google, waiting patiently until the end of the
# sentence to  find out if the subject was soft, anxious, or wise.