OStranslate | Devpost

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summariser and translator

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from the presence of language barriers for international students in education. We recognized the difficulty in learning a second language while adapting to a new culture, which causes education to feel less accessible for international students. We realized that young students in particular have a difficult time in school due to communication issues with their teacher and peers, as well as barriers in parent-teacher communication. Our team hopes to make learning more efficient by summarizing and translating text and audio to different languages. We believe that our website will be a highly useful tool for those having a hard time adjusting to a new learning environment as a result of language barriers.

What it does

OStranslate provides quick and easy summarization and translation by allowing the user to submit numerous types of file formats including text, url, video, and audio. After our website provides a brief summary of the information covered in the uploaded file, the user can choose from 133 different languages to translate between.

How we built it

We built OStranslate using Python, HTML, and CSS to create a webpage with a simple UI that incorporates all our functionalities. We integrated the Symbl.ai and Google Translate APIs into our website using python. Moreover, we used Canva to design a logo and plan out the UI design of our website.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we ran into during the course of this hackathon was attempting to deploy our website from localhost to a public server. At first, we attempted to use Flask and GitHub to deploy our python code. However, we did not have an index.html file which prevented it from being deployed. We then tried coding using php, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML in order to fix this issue. Due to none of us having experience with these languages, we were having trouble understanding the documentation. We thus decided to switch back to python, instead of using docker to deploy the code. We also tried deploying our code using vercel, but ran into some issues as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since our team is composed of members with varying amounts of coding experience, we are proud to have taken on a project that challenged us all greatly. It was a huge accomplishment to have integrated features such as file uploads, summary API, and translation API into our website. Also, we were able to put together a satisfactory project despite the limited time we had after changing our approach twice.

What we learned

Through working on OStranslate, we learned a large variety of things. Firstly, we were able to expose ourselves to more coding languages such as php, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We were additionally able to learn HTML and CSS more in depth through building our website (one of our members also learned Python). Also, we were able to learn and grasp some of the basic concepts of Object Oriented Programming. Moreover, we familiarized ourselves with APIs and learned about how websites are deployed from localhost to a public server. Finally, we learned many soft skills including collaboration skills, problem solving skills, time management skills and staying committed to our goals.

What's next for OStranslate

The next step for OStranslate would be to integrate the Symbl.ai Streaming API for improved live communication. This would help combat language barriers by summarizing conversations in real-time and promptly translating them into the user’s first language. We would also like to add additional formats of file submission including URLs and text input; and add more languages to our translator. Being able to process more text types would also be a plus.