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Show HN: Chrome extension that replaces words into a different language

67 points| drshrey | 9 years ago |alpharabi.us

29 comments

order

ivancamilov|9 years ago

Cool, but the example has a few errors. "students" in spanish is "estudiantes", the example is missing an S.

Also, "more" is "más" in spanish. Accents are important for meaning in a lot of languages.

pkd|9 years ago

Sigh. I was working on EXACTLY the same idea. Well, looks like these guys have the momentum now and the product looks good. Good luck!

drshrey|9 years ago

Thanks for the support! But yeah, what lotyrin said. You should keep working on it because making a genuinely helpful language learning service isn't an easy problem by any means.

EDIT: And it needs all the help it can get.

lotyrin|9 years ago

Keep it up. These guys haven't nailed it yet.

zeluve|9 years ago

You should not give up on this. More products are needed.

elhalyn|9 years ago

Hey Guys, love the idea... since I have the "not invented here" syndrome I am building my own version for quite some time now :) (http://www.langulearn.com)

Next step to implement would be nlp, if you need help or just want to talk -> hello@langulearn.com

clydethefrog|9 years ago

Similar browser extensions are made before.

HN discussions:

Language Immersion for Chrome

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921773

Polyglot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669162

kraftman|9 years ago

Polyglot:

"UPDATE: Due to the shutdown of the Google Translate API, Polyglot is no longer being maintained. It's been ported to use Bing Translate but due to rate limits the service is relatively unreliable and cannot be guaranteed to work consistently."

drshrey|9 years ago

Haven't seen this before but reading through discussions right now. This is really helpful, thanks.

Insanity|9 years ago

I am using the extension now as I am currently learning Spanish. The previous languages that I have learned I have learned through a formal education (English, French and German) but this is the first one that I am just learning on my own, as my SO's family mainly communicates in Spanish.

The idea of this plugin is a neat way to increase my vocabulary a bit and thus I have installed it. But one annoying thing is that I need to open the extensions popup page to click on "translate". I think that it would be nicer if the translation would just happen on pageload.

I will look into doing that myself maybe since the project is on github anyway, but I am at work now. :-)

EDIT: Created an issue for it now ;-)

Davidiusdadi|9 years ago

The same idea has implemented a while ago by http://readlang.com/

Being able to repeat the words i "looked up" is essential for me.

steveridout|9 years ago

Creator of Readlang here. This extension is a little different to mine since it works in the other direction. Readlang allows you to read articles in your target language more easily by offering tap-to-translate. This one gives you occassional exposure to target language words while reading articles in your first language.

steveridout|9 years ago

Nice work so far.

I'm not convinced by this approach since I prefer to learn Spanish words in the context of Spanish sentences, but I haven't given it a fair shot. Of people who have tried this or similar extensions, did you a) find that you learned much? and b) keep using it for a prolonged period?

dvcrn|9 years ago

Very cool idea but slightly disappointed by the language options and constraint on websites. I barely use any of the sites it supports and don't learn any of the languages.

I'm wondering how difficult it would be to pipe random words into google translate and replace them.

perilunar|9 years ago

Pretty easy. You wouldn't even need Google - just store a list of the thousand or so most used words in the script.

I wrote bookmarklet once that replaced every word in a webpage with 'blah'. Rather amusing when used on news websites.

drshrey|9 years ago

Yeah, definitely not hard at all. Although, I think the harder problem is figuring out a specific word's complexity so it corresponds to the relevant immersion factor. For instance, having a lower immersion level shouldn't just mean lesser words (which is what is right now) but also more common and memorable words. Maybe a type of sentiment analysis problem?

drshrey|9 years ago

OH! And it works on other sites too, but that's "experimental" since it's not tested on all sites (which is why we put the on/off slider). Might be interesting to build a DOM parser- in the future -that figures out where relevant, "could be translated" content is in the webpage.

afro88|9 years ago

Very nice. Would love support for German!

drshrey|9 years ago

Thanks, working on it!

phmagic|9 years ago

Brilliant, keep up the good work

drshrey|9 years ago

Thanks, there's a LOT of room for growth and definitely not an easy problem to solve. More updates in the future, though!