Building an app to translate fiction with ChatGPT
I recently built Translate Fiction. It's a simple app to help me translate short fiction and study languages.
This'll stay a side project. I may keep adding features that'll help me learn. Source code is available on GitHub.
The functionality is pretty simple:
- Input text in another language
- Get a first draft translation in English
- Edit the translation as you see fit
- Highlight words or phrases that you want to tweak
- Get multiple definitions for those words
- Improve your translation
- Publish and share your work! (off app)
Recently I'd been wanting to take a stab at translating some more short stories, starting with "The Second Bakery Attack" by Haruki Murakami. I like Jay Rubin's translation, but I wanted to try doing it myself (and to try making the language a bit more casual).
I started out with an online dictionary. Then I figured why not use ChatGPT's consumer app to speed things up a bit? It was still pretty slow going though.
Then I had a thought. Why not build a little app with the ChatGPT API to save time copy/pasting unfamiliar or ambiguous words and phrases, making edits to improve the "literary quality," etc.?
When I was working on Yaya, my co-founder David did all of the work with the APIs, and I focused on UI/UX and prompt engineering. So this time, I was looking for a simple project to work with the API code myself. This was small enough that I could do it all.
I'd never built anything with the ChatGPT API, so I pulled up a YouTube tutorial and started a new Next.js project.
I used Cursor as my IDE and used the AI-powered ⌘K and chat liberally. First I had Cursor generate a simple UI and made some tweaks. Then I followed along with the video to set up an API endpoint to handle requests to the ChatGPT API for the translation. Once I got that working, I added the highlight/explain feature and added functionality to handle different types of messages going to ChatGPT. Then I finished things up by adding keyboard shortcuts (Mac only, sorry) and doing a tiny bit of polish.
Some ideas if I keep working on this:
- Improve automatic language detection for short highlights by looking at language probabilities
- Improve the explain feature to look for literary/cultural references
- Try fine-tuning a model based on my first 10 edited paragraphs to improve generated translation quality
- Add a settings menu to change models, set temperature, etc.
- Improve the UX and clean up the code