Poinsettia Stone

The definition of "Mogging", translated in 5 different ways, including Caveman and Victorian

Inspiration

I personally never understood the excessive use of slang, having isolated myself from social media when I was 15 (I just didn't find it to be that productive I guess, just made me feel bad). Slang was part of that isolation and struggle to understand new sayings. I think it's a similar sentiment for parents for example, whose kids come up with some strange sayings, and a tool to "translate" this slang would be useful to understand slang these days.

What it does

The application accepts a phrase or term, the age of the speaker, and the translated language, and shows 5 translations of the slang in various randomly generated media, completely evading the target language, but still somehow dancing around the definition, and giving the translation in a slightly roundabout way.

How we built it

Google's AI Studio was used to create the general idea and refine specifics, adding more and more possible language translations, and Github Copilot was used to make final adjustments to the program UI.

Challenges we ran into

This was such a huge pivot anyone would get whiplash. We originally planned to create a mobile application to promote exploring the user's neighbourhood and adding a point-based photography aspect to gamify the application.

We started by planning to create a back and front end project with a mobile app front end, until we realized that the devops of connecting the two was a bit more than we had time for.

We then tried to create the entire app as a front end entity and launch it through an android emulator, but encountered significant problems with launching the application, as no one on the team had experience launching these apps.

About 6 hours before the deadline, we pivoted completely into this project idea and worked on this, with little sleep, and here we are, road full of challenges, leading to what we hope is a better project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think we managed to create something that makes us laugh but also does do what it should, for the most part, some translations might not make full sense but I think it really depends on the reader.

What we learned

We really need to think about the specifics of the projects before actually starting to commit to them, but I think it's also important to note the limits of AI, especially with React Native development and deployment.

What's next for Poinsettia Stone

Probably new languages, more translation styles, more catering to new slang as it comes, "mogging" seems to be recent slang but it was able to translate that pretty well.