pretty sure this was done by running one of a set of Usenet propagated YaCC scripts (?) There was a whole set with "Swedish Chef" and "Elmer Fudd" etc, but I can't find them with a quick search.
As I heard it, it was a translation done by Donnie J Barnes of RedHat. It stopped being a language choice because Donnie got too busy to support it any longer.
For the filters, try here: https://linux.die.net/man/1/talkfilters
One year for April Fool's day I released a version of syslogd that would run syslog messages through jive.