Text to ASL Translator

Inspiration

Learning languages is a very difficult task, and online translators help tremendously. ASL isn't represented in translators such as Google Translate, so we created one ourselves!

What it does

This web-app takes input in a text field from the user. After hitting the translate button, the text is parsed and a video containing each word in ASL is stitched together in the backend and displayed

How we built it

We built it using Node.js, Express.js, React.js, and Python.

Challenges we ran into

Properly downloading videos from an online language dictionary. Path naming due to escape characters and data storage. Online language dictionary going down during development. Web-caching causing problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The frontend looks very nice.

What we learned

We learned how to make a web app with a front end and back end. We learned how to run scripts on a server with gcp through Node.

What's next for Text to ASL Translator

Broaden the ASL dictionary and grammar support.

Built With

Submitted to

hackUMBC Fall 2022
- Winner Best Hack Runner Up - 3rd Place

Created by

I worked on the python script to concatenate and sub-title the videos. I also worked on the backend in order to properly parse text into the scripts. I learned a fair bit of web development tricks from this project and sharpened my skills with Node and Express.

Ian Wagner
With minimal experience in Web Development, I took this opportunity to learn about front and back-end stack development, and better understand JavaScript and .html by closely following along my teammates. I gave insight on code efficiency where I could, and asked constructive technical questions that helped the team ensure our project is optimal.

Christina Dao
I worked on the front-end UI. This was my first time working with React and I learned a lot about how the library works.

Sanjaya Gyawali
Przemyslaw Jagielski