American Translator

American Translator

Inspiration

One of the biggest struggles for a Non-Native English speaker is learning American idioms and slang. These pop culture references can serve as a bridge between friends.

What it does

This Google Chrome Extension translates American slang, idioms, and emojis and their simpler definitions.

How we built it

The program is written in JavaScript and has the foundations of a Google Chrome Extension that was based on similar code. It uses Puppeteer to enter a prompt into ChatGPT and scrape that response. The Puppeteer code is too immense to run web-side, so we deployed a server that processes that information and relays it back to the web client. There is a small interface for both the extension description under the icon in the browser bar, and after you process a translation.

Challenges we ran into

None of our group members have ever had experience with Javascript or its libraries such as Puppeteer and Express.js, but we felt they were critical to our project and would increase our depth of knowledge. Furthermore, the plan was to utilize the ChatGPT API, however, it costs money to access. To counteract this, we used Node's Puppeteer library to ask chat GPT the prompt in a ghost window and scrape the information. This created another problem, however, as the Puppeteer script was not able to run in the web environment and we had to create a dedicated server to process the information and relay it back to the web.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Hosting a server-side proxy to bridge the gap between client-side fetch requests to our node packages. Utilizing Puppeteer to bypass the payment system for OpenAI's API. Learning JavaScript and applying it to a web application such as chrome extensions.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively utilize GitHub for a collaborative coding environment. We also learned how to code in Javascript along with applying it to Chrome Extensions.

What's next for American Translator

We would like to implement translations to their native languages as well as a dedicated ChatGPT API implementation. We would also like to develop a permanent server solution such as Google Cloud Functions.