AAARRR! Pirate talk is a varient of English inspired by 16th centuary pirates and used in Talk like a pirate day, and Facebook's English (Pirate) language option.
There's an open source programme, pirate that converts text to pirate speak, it's part of the filters package (ubuntu install link). It reads english on the stdin and prints the pirate speak on the stdout.
It's quite easy to run an external programme in Python using the subprocess module. It has several convenience functions for just running a process and getting the return code (check_call) or getting the output (check_output). However they don't interact with the programme at all, and the pirate command line tool reads off stdin, not the arguments.
Python function
Here's a python function that will take an input english string and return how a pirate would say it.
import subprocess
def translate(english):
translater = subprocess.Popen('pirate', stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
translater.stdin.write(english.encode("utf8")+"\n")
piratese, _ = translater.communicate()
# chop off the trailing new line
piratese = piratese[:-1]
return piratese
Adding custom translations
You may want to add some extra translations specific for you domains (e.g. I made it translate 'Log out' as 'Abandon Ship'). You can do this by adding english = english.replace("Log out", "Abandon Ship") at the start of the function