With the summer coming to a close, I'll be having more free time opening up. I was thinking of picking up the most recent item on my Side Projects of Doom list: a translator.

Things I would want:

• English to a singular specific language
  • No English to Thing and Thing to English like Google/Bing. Just one way.
  • No English to ALL THE THINGS like Google/Bing. Only focused on the one path.
• Not needed to be pretty and scalable
  • This is not a commercial venture -- I'll just be playing
  • The only user is me... and whoever may click on the link to it when I post in #showdev
  • It'll be open sourced and search engine indexed, but since it's a niche use case and not unique, I really doubt anyone will care but me

Keeping those two things in mind, the big sexy option of getting into an NLP solution seems excessive to me. I don't have an army of computers to train with and don't see the need to bring in AWS when the only person using the fine-tuned ML algorithm would be me.

Yes, I could use Google Translate and be done with it, but where's the fun in that? Now I can learn new tech AND a new language. I can leave the natural language processing to the Googles and Bings of the world.

Initial thoughts would be to do it in JavaScript to keep in the realm of what I know while just adding to my skills, as to not create barriers due to needing to learn fundamentals, but I don't know if that's the right tech for the job. I'd just do straight if this than that with objects or something. First match on sentences, then phrases, then words, then just end up keeping the original word if unknown. Maybe learn ES6+ and more TypeScript.

So... keeping in mind that this is fun learning rather than an enterprise project, what would you do if you were in my place? I've only gotten as far as making a Duolingo account to start learning some grammar :)