Babel Fish

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  English view

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  Spanish view

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  Chinese view

Inspiration

In order to foster connections in this time of crisis due to the coronavirus, our team was inspired to create an easy and efficient method to facilitate conversations between people around the world, despite their language differences, via a simple online chatting service that allows each user to participate and view the conversation in their preferred language. Noticing the decrease in travel, increase in xenophobia, and rise in global panic, our team hopes to stimulate global conversation by removing language barriers. By providing a means for users of different languages to communicate, we foster a safer and more understanding world.

What it does

Babel Fish provides a chatroom where people from any background can gather and talk. Simply give yourself a username, select your preferred language, and let Babel Fish handle the translating for you! Users can converse in different languages and understand each other because Babel Fish replaces the unfamiliar language with each individual's chosen one.

How we built it

We used Flask with web sockets to support the chatting service in Python and jQuery. We also used the Google Translate API to provide the translations for each user.

Challenges we ran into

We originally intended to use Java web sockets for our chatroom; however, we could not get our code for that portion of the project to work, even after asking for help from mentors. One of the mentors advised us to look into using Flask with web sockets to run the chatroom, so we learned Flask and used it instead.

What we learned

Before AthenaHacks, neither of us had used Flask or the Google Translate API before.

What's next for Babel Fish

Our next steps would include enabling one-on-one chatting so users can discuss ideas more in-depth with each other rather than remaining in a large chat group.

Built With

• flask
• python