Laughable Lyrics

Harness the power of Google Translate by translating the lyrics of any song to random languages and back to English!

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Laughable Lyrics

What it does

Take the English lyrics of any song and translate them to another language, and then back to English. The result is usually not the same as the original input. Do this multiple times before translating back to English, and you can get some pretty funny results!

Laughable Lyrics is an Android app that lets you do this easily for any song, but also sings the newly remixed lyrics to you for maximum comedy.

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this by Translator Fails, a YouTuber who takes song lyrics , translates them through many languages and back to English, and then sings the result. We decided to make an app to allow anyone to translate lyrics through several languages with ease.

How we built it

Frontend

An Android app built with Kotlin and Android Jetpack, Google's new library of architectural components for data binding, view models, and more.

Backend

An API built with NodeJS, Express, and MySQL. It utilizes Google's Cloud Translation API for translating song lyrics and Genius.com's API for obtaining song data such as titles and lyrics.

Challenges we ran into

  • Android Studio bugs
  • Google Translate API rate limits (it turns out this is why our app failed during our Top 10 presentation!)
  • Finding a good API to use for obtaining song lyrics. Originally we were going to use MusixMatch, but their API only provides 30% of lyrics for free (getting full lyrics costs a lot of money).
  • Debugging the NodeJS backend and handling errors from APIs

What's next for Laughable Lyrics

We'd like to polish it up and eventually get it published to the Play Store. Some features we'd like to add:

  • Show original lyrics and translated lyrics side by side or in a tab view
  • Singing lyrics back to user
  • Allow users to share translation results with friends. Since we already save the translations in a database, it's a matter of creating a web app to display them so they can be shared easily
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