A standard Centronics parallel port was an 8 bit parallel output port with a latch and 4 input bits for status. You would read those outputs with a microcontroller. Poll, or connect the latch line to an interrupt on the controller, read the data on one of the microcontroller's parallel ports, load the byte into the UART, and transmit. Transmission could be IR or RF, you would hook a module up to the Tx line.
Parallel port bandwidth can be pretty high. First thing to do might be to establish just what the throughput is on this thing.