Decyphr
What Is Decyphr?
Decyphr is a multiple purpose translation service that will translate any text to any language you choose. Built on Google Translate, Decyphr aims to help you with any of your translation needs. Whether it's helping you to understand and learn a new language, assisting you with navigating the language barrier in a country where you don't speak the language, or even if it's providing you with the translations for your multilingual website Decyphr will be there to help.
Background Behind Decyphr
I am Irish developer that is currently living in Brazil and as such, trying to learn to speak Portuguese. While doing online lessons in the spoken langauge, I felt that learning to read the langauge would also help me to progress with the language. My then girlfriend suggested that I pick up a book, translate any text that I don't understand and write it down on a piece of paper to help me to remember the phrases, yet I found this to be cumbersome as reading would require the book, a translation tool, pen and paper, and maybe a dictionary too. As a developer I decided that I could probably automate a signifigant amount of this, with the ability to add additional features like:
- text to speech to hear an audio clip of the phrase
- syntactical breakdowns of the phrase to determine which words are verbs, or nouns, etc
- keep track of which translations belonged to which books
- practice sessions to allow me to go back through phrases that I had already translated
I felt that not only would this make my previous manual approach easier, but I also that those additional features would improve my overall learning experience.
Project Growth
As the project grew, and I began to implement internationalization to make the site accessible for more than just English speakers, I found that manually translating each piece of text across the site was tedious, time-consuming and error prone. I figured, I'm building a project that's integrated with Google Translate to translate text for my users, why am I not using this? This lead to the of the to expand and create a tool that would allow me to automate the process of translating the content of decyphr, increasing the number of possibilities of the project.
The list of ideas continues to grow, and as I find more and more areas where translations would improve my day to day I catalog them in head for potential avenues to explore to continue to the expantion of decyphr.
Goals
The goals for decyphr are to make the world of translations as easy for as many people as possible, whether you are developer looking to translate your application, an explorer traveling around the world, a budding linguist, or trying to bridge the communication gap in your loved ones family and friends, decyphr aims to be there to help.