Generational Translator

Inspiration:

Focusing on the topic of Next Generation, we thought about the problems that we are currently facing as college students. We associated the theme “Next Generation” with technological advancements and the problems that come with it. One of our members brought up her own experience of having to teach her grandma how to use a smartphone and even after multiple times of telling her how to unlock the lock screen and how to send messages, her grandma still had trouble understanding it. With smartphone models being replaced every year, the older generation has trouble catching up with the rapid changes in technology, thus leading to greater gaps between generations. This gap is inevitably going to grow wider and wider so we believed that we should find a proactive measure to tackle this problem by utilizing technology.

What it does:

The application translates text that has modern day slang, into texts that contain the meaning of the slang word. For example if “I will be there soon, lmk wya”, is typed, it will be translated into “I will be there soon, let me know where you at”. The program will run until the user enters “exit”.

How we built it:

We built a method called change that finds all Strings in the input that is in our “slang” dictionary. Once found, we replaced each one with the formal definition. For example, “ttyl” would be replaced with “talk to you later.” We used a scanner in the main method to take the input typed from the terminal. Then, we took that input into the change method and returned it as our translation.

Challenges we ran into:

We ran into issues regarding how we were going to enter the text that was going to be translated. Originally, we were going to use the scanner to read a separate text file. But, we ended up settling on the idea of having user type in what they want to be translated and using the scanner to read that text.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

As sophomores we have not taken many CS classes, so we are proud that we were able to finish this project from start to finish during such a short period.

We are also very proud that we incorporated Emory slang into our slang terms. For example, “emory” is translated to “Harvard of the South, “pepsi” is translated to “coke”, and “eagle” is translated to “dooley”.

What we learned:

We built on our interpersonal skills by learning how to work collaboratively in a group coding project.

What's next for Generational Translator:

The Generational Translator need not be only exclusive to the English language – this application can be and should be modified to accommodate the colloquial language of other languages and dialects. With more extensive research and funding, the Generational Translator has the potential to be flexible and accommodate the trends and the fast changes in speech and the written language. The current prototype of the application is unable to differentiate between homonyms that are utilized in slang and the written language. Therefore, the Generational Translator can be further improved on by tackling the aforementioned problem by developing algorithms that are sensitive to the context of the user’s input. In this way, this application can be assured to provide users with more efficient and accurate translations.