Hi everyone, in my job I deal with offshore manufacturing (China). Sometimes communications between me and the vendors break down because the way we word our messages is not conducive to translation. I’ve received some very strangely worded English messages from Chinese vendors, indicating they ran their Chinese words through a translator before sending. Also some of my messages have been misunderstood by vendors, indicating the translated message was significantly different from what I meant to say.

To help verify my messages, I built echolingo.com, a web app that translates text into a destination language, then re-translates (‘echoes’) the translated text back into my own language, so that I can easily confirm that I really said what I intended.

It’s basically a user interface to the AWS Translate API, but even so it makes the task easier than copying and pasting into Google Translate, which is fairly cumbersome if I’m tweaking a message multiple times until it sounds right.

I thought about using a self-hosted copy of the LibreTranslate API, but for a weekend build it was faster to utilize AWS’s existing Translate API. If operating costs become prohibitive, I may switch later.

Currently monetization is via donations only, but if I can get some decent traffic, it may be profitable to run some tasteful ads for related content, such as DuoLingo. Any suggestions on monetization are welcome.

I’d be very grateful for your feedback, as well as ideas for publishing the app so that it can be found by people who could benefit.