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I'm creating a Fuzhounese translator, here's a summary (peanutnoodles.com)

derand1

By derand1
in Non-Mandarin Chinese

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derand1

derand1

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Quick Background

Hi, I'm a 22-year-old, FJ-American living 2 stops from Flushing (Corona).

I work as a software engineer & wanted a creative project to work on. Originally, this was just a cool way to connect my English-speaking BIL & my mother who mainly speaks Fuzhounese.

After realizing how much this could help other speakers, I decided to make it publicly accessible after it's done.

Why doesn't one exist already?

The main problem is with low-resource languages like Fuzhounese (and other dialects) is that there's not enough translation data to make a viable translator. Another obvious issue is that it's an orally-only language...

I got in contact with some FZ groups (Facebook, Discord, etc) and found out that this WAS attempted a few years ago. Check out the report the developers made here.

Meta also attempted to make a translator for Hokkien using AI & newer translation strategies. They made an article here — they made some success, but it looks like an abandoned-ish project.

How can I make one?

  1. Those earlier developers heard about my plans & gave me their WeChat to help out.
  2. I met with a rep from Fuzhou America (fuzhouamerica.org) — a pretty cool non-profit org. They've been wanted to do this for a while & fully onboard with assisting through community efforts.
  3. Meta made all of their research open-source & there's been advances in AI + methodologies.
  4. The biggest hurdle is getting resources. But I collected years of Fuzhounese audio through personal WeChat voice memos, local FJ videos, and other open-source databases.
  5. So far, I created a model that converts FZ Audio to a custom phonetic alphabet which can synthesize Fuzhounese TTS (text-to-speech)—which temporarily handles the "non-existent writing system" issue.

Why am I posting?

If you can speak Fuzhounese, please let me know if you can help verify translation accuracy in the future. Or if you want to receive progress updates or get notified when it's completed, check out the site I made:

 

peanutnoodles.com (Like 拌面 haha)

 

Feel free to let me know your thoughts, or any other dialects that could use some translating.

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OuNuo

OuNuo

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Hey derand1,

 

Great project! In the future, I am planning to learn some 福州话 myself and I think a TTS application would be very helpful so I don't have to pester my in-laws every time I want to know how something is pronounced correctly. In the various resources I found and was recommended from the forum (Forum entry), I would suggest you have a look into the project of the online dictionary at dict link. They provide a somewhat modern phonetic system thats not too hard to learn and might be a big help for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. In the forum entry, a paperback dictionary was recommended to me which I bought. However, it uses a very different, in my opinion more liguistic alphabet and is way harder to learn. 

 

Kind regards,

欧诺

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derand1

derand1

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@OuNuo Hey thanks for the feedback! The last few weeks, I've been down a rabbit-hole searching for anything Fuzhounese and available online. Youtube, Bilibili, Google, Reddit, Baidu, Discord, WeChat, ....the list goes on. The goal was to find enough quality FZ media to train a translation model. Thanks to my relatives living in Fuzhou—I managed to find close to 100+ hours.

 

I should have a speech-to-text model ready soon! (~ next week)

 

The next challenge is English to Fuzhounese speech synthesis—which means dealing with FZ phonetic systems + custom TTS model. I appreciate the resources you provided—I did find those a few weeks back during my initial research. I got in contact with the devs @ the ydict.net project—we're in contact over WeChat. Instead of using what's out there, I decided to create my own system based on IPA. This is so I can easily apply it to other dialects I want to tackle in the future.

 

Feel free to DM me! I'd be happy to keep you updated on anything else I find.

 

(This playlist is pretty solid for learning phrases):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsk7LJCtOoyBVxAXv3Y0OfxTrmsXTI_zm

 

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  • 5 months later...
Michaelyus

Michaelyus

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Sounds like an awesome project! Subscribed to this thread for your updates!

 

Also great to see ydict.net getting involved too - they will have a good amount experience on the phonological side of things!

TheBigZaboon

TheBigZaboon

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And, please, don't keep it all to yourself, and your fellow experts...

 

Other inquiring minds wanna know, too. One doesn't have to wanna learn Fuzhounese to be fascinated by how you build an electronic dictionary/translator from the ground up. You'd have a captive audience, including (as the encouraging remarks and support seem to indicate) lotsa amateurs who'd learn from you as you go along...

 

So, again, please... Just a little report, once in a while...

 

TBZ

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