I was bored today and I got the idea to make a translator for TI calculators. The way it would work is the user would type in a sentence and it would use instring to find all the spaces. It would then translate each word one by one and reassemble them into another string.

I went over to my desk, opened TI connect, and went blank because I do not know every single word in the Spanish language, and even if I did, the program would be huge.

So I was wondering if anyone knew of a list of commonly used Spanish words or something that I could use for this program. If not, it doesn't really matter, I am already working on another project .

I am not willing to discourage you but I am not sure if you understood the problems correctly...
If the translation needs to be useful it should follow some grammar - and I really doubt if you could do this... Sorry.
Also, imagine how much memory that list would take up. You would need at least a computer-comparable, lossless compression algorithm which will guaranteedly fail on being fast enough to be usable.

This is not your or anyone else's fault, it is just due to the extremely slow speed of Basic and due to the extreme memory limitation of the calculator.

(Maybe I am wrong, this is just my opinion, and I would not manage to finish such a hard project, I know that.)

Yeah, I know.
I am definitely not going for grammar, I just wanted to try this out but I need a list of words to start.

Even word-by-word translation ignoring sentence structure requires basic grammar. Verb forms, for example.

Maybe doing this in Axe might work?

This seems kind of Far fetched. A translator for a calculator, although being a very good idea, seems like it would take up more memory than it is worth

You guys are probably right. I will let you guys know if I ever get around to trying it.

Although I strongly doubt you would be able to have any kind of translator simply due to the size limitations of most calcs that are currently out (I guess the new nspires would have enough space, and MAYBE the prizm if you have an efficient compression method, but definitely not on any 8x calc) I don't however think that speed would be much of an issue, since you can always have it split up alphabetically, which would make finding words pretty straightfoward, looking for the first letter, then the second, then the word, or maybe even the third letter if this is found to be more efficient than just 2 letter. If you do carry out this project on a newer calc, which I think would be the only option, I think you should definitely use this opportunity to include a dictionary in there, I mean the words are already there, although I don't know what would be the purpose of a dictionary without definitions, might as well

EDIT: I just noticed for a translator, you would need at least 2 languages in there, definitely scratch the idea of the prizm, but still sounds technically feasible on the nspires, although not necessarily desirable... it would take up so much space I don't think people would be willing to give all that up for a translator (I may be wrong )

There are a few dictionary programs out there, a dictionary would be better suited (and a fun project). Routledge produced a frequency dictionary of Spanish aptly titled "A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish". It contains the most common 5,000 Spanish, organized by frequency (most common to least common), based on transcripts of news reports, movie subtitles, interview transcripts, etc. You can also check out [url]Wiktionary's lists[/url], but those tend to include inflected forms as separate words (perro/perros, bonito/bonita/bonitos/bonitas, está/estabas/estuvieron/estarán, etc.).

Such project would be better off on the TI-Nspire or HP Prime, which has several MB of space. It could probably still be doable on a Z80 or ez80 color model but it would take all calculator memory. Speed would also be an issue if it was written partly in BASIC.