Readable

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  Our website before running our program

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  Translating hard words to Spanish in one paragraph

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  Translating hard words to Spanish in multiple paragraphs

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from one of our team member's experiences dealing with a change in primary language. While reading in the new language, they often encountered new words they had to translate in order to understand the text, and they need to memorize the words to improve their English reading. We wanted to make this study process more user friendly.

What it does

We created a website that can automatically translate any words that the user may not know while reading text, based on the "difficulty" of the word. The user pastes the text that they want to read into a text box, and the program finds the difficult words along with their translation. In this version of the website, we translate the text into Spanish.

How we built it

We divided our project into three parts: an algorithm used to analyze words and determine whether the word is difficult, front-end UI, and web deployment of the project. We trained our program to determine word difficulty using a sorted list of words based on their predetermined frequencies. The more frequent a word came up, the earlier it was in the list, and therefore was determined to be an easier word. Then, we ran the text inputted by the user on our website through our program to determine which words were difficult and needed a translation. These translations are then returned for the user to see.

Challenges we ran into

We divided our project into three parts: an algorithm used to analyze words and determine whether the word is difficult, front-end UI, and web deployment of the project. We trained our program to determine word difficulty using a sorted list of words based on their predetermined frequencies. The more frequent a word came up, the earlier it was in the list, and therefore was determined to be an easier word. Then, we ran the text inputted by the user on our website through our program to determine which words were difficult and needed a translation. These translations are then returned for the user to see.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All our team members' primary coding experience came from Java, and we had to learn how to implement a website with our lack of front-end experience. We tried finding ways to implement Java into HTML, but ended up learning how to write the interactions in JavaScript which our team had limited experience with.

What we learned

We learned how to implement front-end development as well as how to set up a domain and deploy Javascript services onto Linux web servers.

What's next for Readable

We are proud about our accomplishment to create a rough estimate for the difficulty of words from a text. As well as this, as a team, we were able to implement a front-end to our program, despite our limited experiences as back-end developers.

Built With

• apache
• google-translate-api
• javascript
• web