Biling-URL

Learn Languages the Way You Want

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Inspiration

As a team we wanted to learn languages fast, without the hassle of using intensive external programs or paid programs. Our product provides an easy way for people to learn over 60+ languages by reading any online article avaliable so that people can learn in the way they want to, in a way that they will learn the essentials quickly.

What it does

Biling-URL takes the text from any webpage and over time, translates increasingly more words from English to the language of the user's choosing. Over a selected time frame, every time an article is accessed, our extension will take words and translate them into another language, increasing our users knowledge of the words from a firsthand experience.

How we built it

Biling-URL was programmed in JavaScript and JSON, implementing the Google Chrome Web API and Yandex's Language Translation API. JavaScript is used as the logic base for the project, where we increment translated words per page over a time period and keep track of all of the words being translated. JSON is used in conjunction with JavaScript to keep the manifest files and store the web data. The Google Chrome Web API allowed us to modify Chrome web pages to change words to their translated counterparts. Yandex's API allowed us to easily access and translate words through the web without using an intensive external program.

Challenges we ran into

We had many issues with implementing Yandex's API, since none of us knew JavaScript to begin with and we needed to learn it to complete this project. We enlisted the help of Mentors and Stack Overflow to teach us the tools we needed to correctly implement this software. Another issue that came up was that we were unable to translate many words at a time using Yandex's API and we had to create a complex workaround to resolve the issue.To make the software more intuitive, it needs to be able to learn words from the articles its reading and translate them, however we ran into major issues trying to add words to the extension's dictionary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that within this small amount of time we were able to become proficient at a new language we had never learned before and we were able to create a functioning web application that would be able to help others. As a team we accomplished something we did not believe possible, and created an application we view on par with other language-development software.

What we learned

Through this project we learned the true power of Google's Chrome Extensions and how we can manipulate webpages and use JavaScript for constructive purposes. This project began as a personal way for us to learn languages in a way we saw fun, however we expanded into an intuitive way for everyone to learn new languages.

What's next for Biling-URL

We hope to continue working on this project and create a faster and more efficient replacing algorithm in the future, and color code the replaced words so that people know which words have been altered. We also hope to track data collected in language proficiency and supply our users with updates about their progress into learning a new language.

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