Chinese <> English Technical Dictionary App Prototype
Learning Chinese in the context of engineering gets hard because many translation/dictionary resources are too general purpose. I have always wanted a dictionary that translates technical words that I use often - so now it's time to build one!
If you want to browse around the app while you read this post, here's the link (try it on your phone!): https://fearless-expert-2751.glideapp.io/
[lwptoc]
App Prototyping
I decided to use Glide to build the app prototype. It involves very little coding and made the whole process extremely quick and easy.
This is what I considered essential to making the dictionary usable:
I must be able to search in English, Chinese, and pinyin. Sometimes I hear a word I haven't heard before and know only the sound - it's important to be able to look these words up using pinyin.
After looking up a word, I wanted to be able to hear how it sounds. So I wanted audio to show how to pronounce each word in Chinese.
I wanted to leave space in the app for usage examples later since I know some words would need clarification
I wanted to leave space for notes
Making it Useable
With the overall structure in place, there were 3 things I had to do:
Create a list of words and their translations
Generate related information such as pinyin and the audio file
Import all this data into Glide
Word <> Translation Database
Unfortunately there was no magic here. I'm only building this because automatic translations don't live up to my expectations. So I had to take the old fashioned route and manually get the right translation(s) for each word I wanted to add.
Pinyin and Audio
I used Python to create a script that:
Got pinyin information from Chinese characters (装配 > zhuāngpèi)
Generated searchable pinyin (zhuāngpèi > zhuangpei zhuang pei) because...
It would be ridiculous to type zhuāngpèi into the search bar, I would rather just type zhuangpei
I should get the same result whether I type zhuangpei or zhuang pei - so I generated all the variants of where the spaces could be to use for search purposes later. This is a slightly roundabout way of doing it but I've had to do it due to a limitation of the search function in Glide.
Generated a sound file that I would upload onto my server (eg. www.luvsheth.com/TranslationAppAudio/FILENAME)
Added a link to the sound file so that the app knows where to look for the audio
Data Import
Unfortunately Glide doesn't offer data import just yet, so I had to create an interesting workaround... I created a script that would load up an Excel sheet and paste it into Glide one entry at a time. Video shown below.
Result
This is the first app I've built and tools like Glide have made it very easy to do. My future goal for this is to just keep building a larger database of words. Right now the only category that really has entries is CAD but I'd also like to add words for Injection Molding, Manufacturing & Production, etc.
I will also import this database into my daily use Chinese dictionary app; but it was fun creating this prototype anyway. I think I will continue to use this as a standalone "engineering dictionary" app as well because sometimes having too many words to search from adds many irrelevant words to the search results: like shown below for 装配/zhuāngpèi.
