i. Title ---------- Language phrase exchange ii. Author ------------ Ferda Taylor iii. Abstract --------------- I intend to develop a web site that will facilitate the exchange of foreign language phrases in order to provide users with practical experience. iv. What ---------- The application will: - allow users to submit phrases and their translations via the web site. - provide users with links to various online news and tourism sites. - provide a link to an audio file pronunciation of the phrase. - give users the option to print out a personal manual of phrases. - allow users to access the phrases via the web, telephone mobile phone browser. Users will be able to establish a free account, which will allow the webmaster the ability to track and mediate user entries and overall usage. Upon creation of the new account, the user will be provided with a portal view based on their choice of countries in addition to a phone number they can use to call the application. The portal view will be implemented in the same spirit as Wahoo! The user will see content based on their choice of countries. The content may include news feeds, tourism links and audio-file pronunciations of a chosen phrase. The telephone interface will be implemented in VoiceXML. I hope to be able to build in a feature that will allow users to call the application from anywhere in the world to get an immediate translation to a phrase. v. Why -------- I got the idea for this project from browsing wiki-s, Merriam-Webster and using the language translation tool on the langtolang site. I've noticed throughout my life that cultural misunderstanding be they humorous or tragic have been due to a lack of experience between the communicating parties. Also, when talking to friends and relatives their biggest complaint is always that they forgot the languages they learned in school because they have no use for them after they graduate. So, I figured why not create a web site to facilitate that hard-to-get practical experience people lack outside of school. vi. How --------- I will not be straying far from a J2EE architecture as I believe it is the best alternative for any web applications. I will be using J2ME for the wireless implementation. I will be using XSLT to read and write XML files with the transformations done using Java servlets. I'm not sure if I will need any additional packages for special characters so I will leave a question mark here. The personal manual will use FOP to produce a personal dictionary as either a PDF or HTML file. For the telephony part I will be using VoiceXML. I will definitely need to understand the whole VoiceXML process from what it is to how it is used in addition to how XML works with J2ME. vii. Questions ---------------- Primarily, is this enough? I feel really excited but seriously nervous that I may be biting off more than I can chew. What recommendations or hints can you give me that may lead me in a realistic direction as far as what I implement? Is there anything you'd like see that I haven't mentioned or thought about?