Multilingual Translator
Android App
Aakash Jha #1,
Ashok Kumar Shrestha #2, BijayBikramKhadka #3
# Department of CSE, Brindavan College of
Engineering
Dwarakanagar,
Baglur Main Road, Yelahanka, Bangalore, India, 560063
1 aakashjha007@gmail.com,2cs.ashok007@gmail.com,3
moibijay@gmail.com
Abstract—This Multilingual Figurative
Language Translator is an application to translate from English language to
three other languages, Nepali, Hindi and Kannada. It categories commonly used
words and phrases in daily conversations into meaningful groups. Using this
offline app, tourists can rely on mobile phone for travelling purpose. This
application is intended to overcome the language barrier among tourists, who
are visiting our country. Subsequently, by using this application they are able
to integrate with the local people and get the right information.
Keywords:
mobile application, language translator, multilingual
conversion, general queries, phonegap, cordova, tts plugins
I. INTRODUCTION
Globally, the
mobile applications are rapidly developing and have become a prominent segment
of the mobile technology. It consists of software that runs on mobile devices
and performs certain task for the user of the mobile phone. As such, tourists
can rely on mobile phone for travelling purposes. Mobile dictionary is used for
word search for a better travelling guide.
This application
is intended to overcome the language barrier among tourists, who are visiting
Nepal and India. Subsequently, by using this application they are able to
integrate with the local people and get the right information.
The tourists from all over the world have
the potential to visit Nepal and India. This statement is supported by the
information which gathered from “The World Tourism rankings” report compiled by
the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
However, most of
the tourists are facing communication problem as they could not speak the local
language to the local people because the language is not internationally used.
The consequences of inability to understand the national language resulted in
tourists unable to mix well with our culture and traditions as well as
receiving wrong information. Furthermore, misunderstandings can cause complications
and might lead to unpleasant circumstances.
Although there are
books available for new learners to speak these local languages, it will take
time for the tourists to understand the language. Furthermore, it takes time to
refer and practice to get good pronunciation of the words before they will be
able to talk. To aid the tourists in fast and easy learning, the Mobile
Language Translator is designed. This application is an important tool for
tourists because it helps them to communicate with the local people especially
when they are travelling from one destination to another destination within Nepal
and India asking for directions.
II.
PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
Most of the
language translator applications that had been developed are web based such as
the Google Translator. There are very few language translator applications
available in mobile based application. Moreover, the current language
translators do not have wide translation such as English into Nepali, Hindi and
Kannada.
The following
details elaborate the problem identification of the above:
A.
Language barriers among tourists
The language barrier is still everywhere.
Most tourists do not learn the language before going for vacation or visiting
other countries. Through the questionnaire distributions, about 70% of the
tourists do not have awareness about the language. The other 25% have awareness
about the language existence and are in the process of learning it. The
remaining 5% have learnt the language more than the intermediate level.
B.
Risk of getting wrong information
Translating the word directly from one
language to another language can have effects of wrongly phrased or defined.
For any immediate information or directions, the tourists need to depend on the
locals nearby. Any wrong information may cause inconvenience to the tourists
and cause significant impact to the tourisms industry. The translation done
directly word to word may lead to completely different meaning in another
language.
C.
Extra cost and budget
Tourists had to hire a translator or buy
expensive books to learn the language. To learn from books will take the
tourists a long time and if they hire a translator, the cost of hiring is very
high.
III.
OBJECTIVES
This project has
several goals that need to be achieved towards the entire development of the
application. Based on the analysis of various related applications and
discussions including research and hypothesis, the determined objectives of
this project are:
a) Translation of common phrases in English
to Nepali, Hindi and Kannada in mobile platform: Translation of common phrases
which are used daily to communicate and enhance understanding of the language.
b) Translation of common phrases in English
to Nepali, Hindi and Kannada in mobile platform: Translation of common phrases
which are used daily to communicate and enhance understanding of the language.
c) Develop pronunciation of the word and
phrase: Ability to pronounce the words and phrases to learn the language.
Button for “pronounce” will be available.
IV.
SCOPE
This research
focuses on operations and performance. The scope of the project covers the
followings:-
a) Categorizing the language for
translation and categorizing the phrases according to the category available in
books. Categories include food, transportation etc. This is done to simplify
the accurate search of particular phrase.
b) Ability to translate a particular word
or phrase to another language. Language which will be available for translation
is English into Nepali, Hindi and Kannada. The phrases and words are based on
the general queries while having conversations at different events.
c) Pronunciation of particular phrases. It
has provided ability to listen to the audio of how a particular word is
pronounced.
d) Prioritize the words or phrases
according to alphabetical order. This will enable the user to search faster for
particular words or phrases for future usage.
V.
SIGNIFICANCE
The appropriate
significance of this application is to adopt information technology into the
language translation as it will help improve the way a language is translated.
Certainly, most users, professionals and information workers naturally
recognize the significance of technology for organizing, streamlining and
simplifying their daily tasks.
This mobile
application would create a great milestone for tourism industry and other
business ventures. Today’s mobile provides a vast opportunity for managing the
cost, connecting new customers, increasing productivity, getting new products
and speedy services. It is also customer friendly to provide the best comfort
and services when using this application. The operations of the language
translator can be enhanced and become profitable if it adapts well to the
technology innovations. By using this application, users would not have to
write down everything on a piece of paper. It is as “Why use an old-fashioned
method to key in a lot of information if there is a system that could support
large number of data thus simplifying all the complicated tasks”.
VI. LIMITATIONS
The application
only translates:
- English to Nepali
- English to Hindi
- English to Kannada
In future, the
translation can be enhanced to any other languages. In order to view images and
text, a large mobile phone screen is, of course, preferable. It is true that
mobile phone makers have made their screens larger and larger. However,
obviously it cannot be too large or mobile phones would not be portable or
convenient. Resolution is another problem. Most mobile phones' image resolution
cannot compete with computers whose resolutions are usually 800 x 600 or 1024 x
768 pixels.
VII. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Review of Current Situation
In
the last few years, we have seen that many tourists preferred Nepal and India
as their holiday destination. Most of these tourists like to move independently
and with our good road system and availability of public transport they are
comfortable with their visit here but they encounter communication problems.
Moreover, there is no availability of language applications in mobile platform
had made it difficult to do translation. This had led to inconveniences such as
waste of time and money.
B. Review of Related Literature
The
researchers reviewed on related researches that were carried out and formally
published on mobile applications. The white paper which is published by
SoneraMediaLab on 12 September 2002 in this paper JAVA 2 Micro Edition and
Mobile Information Device Profile has given developers lots of possibilities to
create applications and services for new mobile phones and other portable
devices. [2] There are many development environments, emulators, programming
tools and tutorials available on the Internet. With MIDP application
development, many problems are caused by the differences between devices
properties, such as screen size and color depth. However, version 2.0 has
already been specified, and it will bring many improvements like sound and a
game API. Support for floating point arithmetic and network sockets will be
added. These improvements provide lots of new possibilities, but before MIDP
version 2.0 appears in mobile devices.
The
limitations of mobile phone learning is published by JALT CALL in the year
2006. “In this paper, from the psychological, pedagogical and technical
standpoints, we have analyzed the limitations of mobile phone learning.
Psychologically, people have not become used to mobile phone learning;
pedagogically, mobile learning results are not easy to evaluate or follow-up;
and, technically, small screen size, inconvenient input, small memory, and the
lack of common standards are hindrances that keep people away from learning
using mobile phones”. [3]
CLEI
Electronics in 2004 published, “There are several development tools for mobile
application proposed by several author, however these tools have some
disadvantages. In this paper, they described MADEE, a development and execution
environment for mobile information systems running on Pocket PCs and
conventional computers. Using MADEE, a user can develop specific medium size
systems in a fraction of time usually spent developing a mobile information
system with a conventional programming language or programming tool. [4]
Apart
from the above, SUN Microsystems in 2000 published a white paper that describes
the new Mobile Information Device environment and some of the differences
likely to be encountered. It provides suggestions that will help to create
innovative, compelling consumer products despite the technological challenges
to be overcome. There will be a brief overview of consumer expectations for
these devices; some thoughts on strategies for designing for this marketplace;
and an overview of the basic concepts in the Mobile Information Device (MID)
Profile including screens and abstract commands. [5].
This
journal which is published by Technology Evangelist Sun Microsystems, Inc in
2001 describes “WML, WAP’s markup language, works well for certain kinds of
applications, such as text-centric applications like text weather reports,
stock quotes, etc. But there are a number of weaknesses with WAP which
in-device Java technology can overcome”. [6] WAP-based applications require a
constantly available network connection, since the application themselves
reside on a server and require frequent use of the wireless connection. WAP
logic executes on the server-side as it is not good at graphics intensive
applications. [7]
C. Language Translator Applications
This
language translator includesgeneral queries which occur in daily conversations.
Some of them are extracted from online language learning sites such as Omniglot
online encyclopedia and as well from some famous books such as India: A
traveler’s guide.
This translation app android and phonegap
plugins for language translation. The necessary plugins are provided by the
cordova for phonegap. This app uses phonegap to create the application.
1)
Phonegap: PhoneGap is a
mobile development framework created by Nitobi. Adobe system purchased Nitobi
in 2011. It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile
devices using Java Script, HTML5 and CSS3 instead of relying on
platform-specific APIs like those in iOS, Windows phone or Android. It enables
wrapping up of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code depending upon the platform of the
device. It extends the features of HTML and JavaScript to work with the device.
The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly
native mobile application (because all layout rendering is done via web views
instead of the platform's native UI framework) nor purely web-based (because
they are not just web apps, but are packaged as apps for distribution and have
access to native device APIs). Mixing native and hybrid code snippets has been
possible since version 1.9.
2)
Cordova: The software underlying PhoneGap is Apache Cordova.[17] The
software was previously called just "PhoneGap", then "Apache
Callback".
Fig: list of supporting features for different OS
3)tts
plugin: Speech Synthesis is the artificial
production of human speech. A
computer system used for this purpose is called a speech computer orspeech synthesizer, and can be
implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system
converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic
linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.
Synthesized
speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored
in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system
that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack
clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences
allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a
model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a
completely "synthetic" voice output.
A
text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a
front-end and a back-end.
Fig: Overview
of typical TTS system
The front-end
has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like
numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This
process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization.
The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides
and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences.
The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called
text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and
prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation
that is output by the front-end.
The
back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic
linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes
the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which
is then imposed on the output speech.
VIII. PROJECT METHODOLOGY
In developing this
application, the Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) with Unified
Software Development Process (USDP) is used. OOAD is a software engineering
approach that models a system as a group of interacting objects.
Object-oriented analysis (OOA) applies object-modeling techniques to analyze
the functional requirements for a system. Object-oriented design (OOD)
elaborates the analysis models to produce implementation specifications. [13]
OOA focuses on what the system does, OOD on how the system does it. OOAD
suggests the application of the fundamental concepts which includes Class,
Object, Method, Message passing, Inheritance, Encapsulation, Abstraction and
Polymorphism and force programmers to think in terms of objects, rather than
procedures, when they plan their code. [14]
A. Inception phase
During the
inception phase, the feasible study is performed as well as the overall scope
and size of the project is determined. The actor of the system and their
interaction with the application are analyzed at a high level. A visit was done
to Tourism ministry and Department of Information to get information about
tourist and their awareness on the communication language in our country. In
the inception phase, the following tasks have been done. Interviewing 10
tourists who directly handled the application is a suitable approach to gather
the information and requirements. In terms of translation he endures difficulty
to get exact translation of the language he translated. Observation on
available applications was made to get more knowledge and idea when developing
mobile applications.
B. Elaboration phase
During the
elaboration phase, the researchers are expected to capture a healthy majority
of the system requirements. However, the primary goals of “elaboration” are to
address known risk factors and to establish and validate the system
architecture. All these eight related products and several related literature
were reviewed to gain more insight onto the mobile language translator
application. The features of each of these applications were carefully analyzed
and detailed and a comparison was conducted when the researchers develop the
translator. All the languages used in the related products were considered when
making the choice of language for translation. Word categorization according to
categories, pronunciation of the words and phrases and quick search functions
were scrutinized and examined. These features have been identified to be
included in the application.
C. Construction phase
In this phase the
application coding and the interface will be developed. During the development,
testing and analyzing will be done to identify the weaknesses of the
application to improve the quality of the product. [15]
Fig: Use case diagram
D. Transition phase :
Overall, this
phase suggests the deployment of the application or final product to the user
of the project to let them know what the application is all about and to give
the opportunity to them to evaluate the application based on specific criteria
accordingly.
Fig: State diagram
IX. TESTING
A. Unit testing
The primary goal of
unit testing is to take the smallest piece of working code in the application,
isolate it from the remainder of the code and determine whether it behaves
exactly as expected. In this project, each unit is tested separately before
integrating them into modules to test the interfaces between modules. For
example, Mobile Language Translator contains some features such as translation
task, quick search task and pronunciation task. All the features are tested
separately to make sure it is functional before moving it onto the integration
testing.
Fig: Menu of app
B. Integration Testing
Integration testing
is a logical extension of unit testing and it occurs before developer testing.
Integration testing is which individual software modules are combined and
tested as a group. By using a test plan that requires testing each unit and
modules, this ensures the capability of each unit before combining units. In
this project, integration testing performed on the modules such as translation
task and quick search task.
C. Developer Testing
Developer testing
is performed after other testing such as unit testing and integration testing
to detect the errors and make sure the output of the input is accurate as the
user expected.
Fig: Sub menu
The main purposes
of this testing is to ensure the features that involved in the modules are working
as intended and the system runs smoothly without errors or slowdowns. This test
is important to make sure all errors are detected and solved before deliver to
the end user of this system. Upon completion of this test and if all test ran
successfully, the system is ready to be delivered to the user. [16].
D. User Feedback
The information and
comments from users is very important and can help the developer to develop a
system that fulfills user’s requirements and needs.
Fig: General queries and translation
The information and
comments from users is very important and can help the developer to develop a
system that fulfills user’s requirements and needs. Without the feedback and
evaluation from users, the system will fail to achieve its objectives and
user’s requirements. The feedbacks are gathered on the content, interface and
functionality of system through testing and questionnaires conducted with the
system users.
X. CONCLUSION
The main purpose of this research is to
produce an application which manages communication barrier among tourist. As a
conclusion, to develop a mobile based system takes more time in order to
complete the application with better features and functionalities. Moreover,
the limitation of the API affects the development of this application.
According to the research results, there are some recommendation on this system
to fulfil the needs and requirements of the end-users. In future, new
improvements can be implemented on this application where the upgraded versions
can provide the user to access more languages for translation. Moreover, online
functions can be added to provide more updated information. In future version,
the option on adding phrases by end-user to database will be added to provide
convenience for the user.
REFERENCES
[1]
Policy and Practice of Global Tourism, retrieved from
pub.unwto.org/.../110330_policy_practice_global_tourism_excerpt.pdf
[3] Shudong, Wang and Higgins, Michael,
Limitations of Mobile Phone Learning, The JALT CALL Journal, 2006, Vol. 2, No.
1, pp. 3-14.
[4] Guillermo Licea Sandoval, A development
platform and execution environment for mobile applications. CLEI Electric
Journal, Volume 7, Number 1, Paper 4, June 2004.
[5] Applications for Mobile Information
Devices, Helpful Hints for Application Developers and User Interface Designers
using theMobile Information Device Profile White Paper, Sun Microsystems Inc,
2000.
[6] Bill Day, Developing Wireless
Applications using the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, Sun Microsystems, Inc.,
2011.
[13] Simon, B., Steve, M. & Ray,
F.(2006). Object Oriented Systems Analysis & Design (3rd edition).
McGraw-Hill Education: Publisher
