Polyglot - Learn Cherokee

Immerse yourself in the Cherokee language and culture with Polyglot, a web app designed for learning through engaging Cherokee stories and their English translations.

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Inspiration

The Cherokee language stands at a critical crossroads. Once spoken fluently across the southeastern United States, it has now become endangered, with a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily among the elderly population. The preservation of the Cherokee language must be of high importance to our society because language is a vessel of culture, history, and ancestral knowledge. It encapsulates the worldview of its people, including their relationships with the environment, their social practices, and their spiritual beliefs. The Cherokee language is a testament to the ingenuity and resilience of the Cherokee people. Losing the language would mean severing a vital connection to the past and an irreplaceable loss of cultural diversity.

What it does

Polyglot is your gateway to learning Cherokee, offering an engaging experience with short, enjoyable texts in both Cherokee and English. Elevate your learning journey by listening to authentic audio recordings of these texts, immersing you in the rich sounds of the Cherokee language. Dive deep into the cultural essence of the language for a comprehensive understanding. Encounter an unfamiliar word? Simply select it, and Polyglot instantly delivers the translation, streamlining your learning process. Embrace the vibrant world of Cherokee through Polyglot, where culture and language learning intersect seamlessly.

How we built it

Front End: Built using JS, React, and Ant-Design Back End: Build using MongoDB, FastAPI, and Python

For our voice-over feature, we used Google's Text-to-Speech API.

Challenges we ran into

Incorporating the Cherokee language into our application posed unique challenges, particularly due to the complexity of its writing system and the scarcity of readily available resources. One of the primary challenges was ensuring accurate rendering and manipulation of Cherokee characters within our app. Unlike more widely used alphabets, such as the Latin alphabet, the Cherokee syllabary is not universally supported across all platforms and devices.

Additionally, the scarcity of Cherokee language content, especially translated stories and educational materials, further complicated the development process. There exists a significant gap in available Cherokee-language content online, with much of the literature and educational resources either not digitized or not translated into Cherokee.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since there is a lack of translation API that can translate English to Cherokee and vice-versa, we had to create a way to work around this problem. We ended up manually crafting a CSV file with the most commonly used words in English and their translation in Cherokee. During runtime, we used the CSV file as a HashMap to find available translations of English to Cherokee. Moreover, another feature we are proud of is the voice feature because it was challenging to use the Text-to-Speech API from Google with the Cherokee language.

What's next for Polyglot

We need to develop a robust API that will help us make Cherokee translations in an easier way. This could be achieved by training a Neural Machine Translation algorithm that learns Cherokee and is able to make English to Cherokee translation. Additionally, we need Cherokee domain experts that will help us make more accurate translations and voice-overs on the texts included in our website.

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