ADIOS! CIAO! SAYONARA! PEACE!

The inspiration for my left navigation portfolio, the Say website, and the soon-to-be App was a technical challenge. This project is still in progress. I will have a lot of fun and face additional challenges building the app and getting it ready for the App Store.

Project: Language Learning – Website / App (Coming Soon)
Client: Self
Role: Founder & Creator
Website: canyousayhello.com

I learned to love words, and I found out I have some skill putting them together. I have a related book coming out soon. Growing up in Oakland, CA, saying a word or phrase or two in Spanish to “switch it up” for fun is not abnormal, especially since most of us took Spanish in grade school and often interact with Spanish speakers. We’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger do it in movies too: “Hasta la vista, baby!” 🔫. We are all aware of this type of pop culture phenomenon. The focus of this site is on learning basic greetings from a short list of languages, which will be easier to retain and use in real life. On the website, I will add at least 10-15 greetings to the list and flash cards for each of the 6 languages. I also provided the capability to translate greetings from a longer list of languages via a custom translator.

DESIGN

My initial vision changed from bright color cards to the modified name tag sticker theme. Below are some of my early drafts from Figma. I liked how the name tag stickert theme looked, and I decided to move forward with it.

LIVE WEBSITE

The left navigation just makes sense with this design, for the web. I put the project on pause to work on other things. When I rebuilt my design portfolio, I borrowed this idea from myself.

AUDIO

I also wanted to add an audio button for each greeting. I experimented with basic text-to-speech options, but I found a way to create the audio of my desired text with natural-sounding pronunciations. Playback of the audio translation on demand was a challenge in finding the right solution for my needs. It took a lot of trial and error with various plugins to get the audio to play via a play button in a small space.

LOGO

This project was going to be an app design only. The initial logo design was created based on that vision and was considered somewhat of a placeholder or temporary logo. Once I moved on to designing for the web first and created the name tag sticker theme, I needed to update the logo.

Updated Logo 2

TRANSLATOR / CUSTOM WORDPRESS PLUGIN

The website is designed to be a visual and quick reference. Adding several more languages in this same flashcard-like style would mean taking a different navigation approach. In the future, I may design individual language pages to accomplish that. Another approach is to provide the option for users to translate additional languages via a dropdown. I added a live language translator based on the Google Cloud Translator API to the website. This required a lot of Google Cloud steps and a lot of SSH commands to get it to work properly, a lot of research, coding, troubleshooting, and problem-solving.

My research suggested that creating a custom WordPress plugin to create the translation feature was the best and most secure approach. This is my first time creating a plugin, and I am happy that it is operational. I crashed the site at least 5 different times and had to go back to SSH commands to troubleshoot and correct issues to make the site visible again. It was a headache, but I am proud of this accomplishment.