Help me read Spanish

Inspiration

Whenever I am doing my Spanish readings, I often find myself getting lost. I probably understand around 19 words out of every 20, but, for me, it is important that I understand all 20. That's how I will truly understand the text. Furthermore, it was always really annoying to have to look up each individual word, and, oftentimes, I would just not look them up because I was too lazy. To combat this problem, I built this webapp to be able to better understand my Spanish homework and to allow other to understand theirs.

What it does

Any user of 'Help me read Spanish' simply needs to paste in a text in English or Spanish and click a submit button. That button will redirect them to a page where every word is a hyperlink, a live translator will provide output for a selected word, and the user can save words that they want to learn. If you're interested in using it, please follow the instructions on the page.

How I built it

I decided to use a webapp framework that I used in my Software Engineering class at Brown in tandem with some html and javascript. Additionally, I decided to use SpanishDict as my translating software, although I did have to build a pseudo-'API' to get it to work.

Challenges I ran into

I had a lot of trouble developing my aforementioned psuedo-'API' to get the translations for Spanish and English words. Additionally, I really wanted to be able to translate phrases, since so much of language is idiomatic. I was able to address both of these challenges by understanding the source material for my translations better and developing a backend-frontend collaboration to translate some, but not all, phrases.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think that this is something that I can actually see myself using when I am doing homework. I feel like other students of Spanish or English can actually take advantage of this almost fully-fledged webapp to understand more of the language that they want to learn.

What I learned

I feel like I learned quite a bit about the methods of translation and developing webapps. I was also able to augment my frontend skills, since some of the actions that I wanted to perform necessitated being able to extract data using only html or javascript.

What's next for Help me read Spanish

I still feel like translation for phrases can be better and that some of my translation calls are suboptimal. I think that I could look more toward making the app more efficient and more encompassing in its translations so that it would be much easier for users to take advantage of.

Built With

• english
• html5
• java
• javascript
• spanish