The Problem

Travelers, immigrants, and international professionals often face the issue of language barriers and miss out on being able to quickly understand what others are saying. These language barriers lead to confusion, lost time, frustration, and sometimes errors in personal or professional settings.

Current solutions like smartphone translation apps are often slow, inaccurate, and unable to handle regional dialects or cultural nuances. Solutions on the smartphone are lacking due to having to get the phone out and launch the application.

Problem Characteristics

Joanna Graphman from our CS 410 class stated that when she was in Japan, Google Translate failed to capture what she was saying, which would lead to confusion. She said the delays in translations inconvenienced people who were busy and trying to communicate with her.

Caleb Tucker, one of this teams project members, disclosed a time he attended a zoo in California where he encountered a lost child who didn’t speak English. Due to the inability to communicate, reuniting the child with her parents was more difficult and time consuming than it could have been.

Transformer-based models can translate text quickly and affordably, but they often struggle with cultural or situational nuances that go beyond direct word meanings. For example, consider the phrase “File that in the bin.” In some American workplaces, “bin” might be understood as a folder or designated box for documents—an innocuous instruction. However, in the U.K., “bin” usually refers to a trash can, leading to a very different (and potentially incorrect) interpretation. As a result, the translation might be technically correct yet fail to capture the intended context.