How I built a translation engine in a weekend

and managed to go out on Friday and Saturday nights

Google Translate is powered by the technique called machine translation. It can translate sentences from one natural language to another, without human interactions. I recently heard that Mozilla was starting a project to create an open source machine translation engine. That immediately resonated in me and I decided to give it a try and build my own English-Japanese translator in JavaScript.

Day 1: Get ready

On the Friday late afternoon, I had a general idea of what I wanted to implement: a machine translation engine using syntax to translate sentences. I wanted something simple and couldn’t wait to see it working. I realized I had this “fire in the belly” and jumped directly into the action. I spent a small amount of time gathering what I needed: a corpus of translated pairs in English and Japanese and a part-of-speech tagger for these languages. I started fiddling around with the tools with as few coding as possible.

Day 2: Put it together

I had a late night and woke up on Saturday around 11 o’clock. I spent a few hours cleaning up what I had done the day before, creating a dedicated folder and project in my IDE. I started coding and refactor the code. I also spent some time sketching solutions on paper, to make sure I hadn’t missed an important point.

Day 3: Make it work

I got back to the project in the early afternoon. I mostly did coding this day. I was so excited to see my translation engine work that I sat in front of my computer for ~10 hours. At the end of the day, I had something working. After a bit of cleaning, I created the repo on Github and pushed the code.

After day 3

Whatever happened after day 3 is not important. Most of the work has been done over the weekend and I had a working prototype. Obviously, it is just a toy system, that is nothing comparable to Google Translate, but I’m happy I was able to do it in a rather limited amount of time. And most importantly, I can iterate on it and progressively make it better. Try it for yourself!

Conclusion

I was able to achieve this because JavaScript is very suited for fast prototyping. If it were a business, I could have started generating profit from day 4. I really love the idea of hacking a quick and dirty prototype and see how it works. Next time you have an idea for a business, do some quick prototyping and launch it as early as possible!

And if you’re wondering, I had dinner in a lovely Italian restaurant on Saturday night :-)