What I Built: Naomi Quinones’s Practical Translation App

What I Built: Naomi Quinones’s Practical Translation App

Several years back, when California began having increasingly severe wildfire seasons, Naomi Quinones found herself spending hours on the phone to communicate with her students. As an instructor for the Berkeley Adult School, Quinones teaches ESL classrooms with as many as six different language backgrounds. When the fires hit and forced the school to close down, she had to send out text messages in a number of different languages.

“With Google Translate you can do one language at a time, so I would copy and paste it for each student, switch the language, if they responded I would translate what they said, get my answer and translate that—it took more than two hours to get through the whole class,” Quinones says. “I kept thinking, if there was some other way I could get Google Translate to let me do all the languages at once and send a message to my students in their language, that would be awesome.”

When Quinones began the Techtonica apprenticeship in 2019 to learn more about coding, her idea became a reality.

Techtonica, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that offers low-income women and non-binary adults with six months of free tech training, became the place where Quinones could build her developer skills and community. It also offered the perfect opportunity to create her first major code project, an app called “Just Say In.”

The app was Quinones’ final project for the program, and she constructed it with help from Twilio’s Programmable Messaging API and the Google Translate API. With “Just Say In,” users can type in a line in English and receive that translation in as many languages as the user needs.

Now, when Quinones has to communicate something complicated that her students might not understand, she can use “Just Say In.” Whether it’s a message about the class schedule or something to do with registration, Quinones can simply type the words in and receive Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, and any other language all at the same time.

“I’ve still been using this app in my literacy class,” Quinones says. “During the pandemic it’s been really awesome, since I display the screen and they all see it at once.”

Meet the Creator: Naomi Quinones

Finding her way into programming wasn’t an obvious path for Quinones. She says now that patience and determination were a big part of it.

“Learning this takes a lot of work, especially if you’re coming from a nontraditional background. I was not a math or computer science person and learning these concepts is a bit of a challenge.”

The things that helped her most were working within a community of learners, and coming to realize that there are a number of roles in the tech world. You don’t necessarily need to know everything—you just need to find out what you like and what you want to do.

What’s next?

Quinones is still working as an ESL instructor as she continues to build her knowledge of software engineering. She hopes to continue using programming as a way to solve real-world problems. One of her current ideas is based on the experience she had seeing her mother die from ALS. This incurable disease can be devastating for family members, and she remembers reading a number of scientific papers to try and find any way to help.

From that experience, she imagines building an app that would scan all the medical research on a specific topic and extract from it information on dietary changes and possible medications for different illnesses. She thinks it would be a matter of finding machine learning algorithms that could distill that information for a general reader.

Another idea Quinones has had is to try and create visualizations of the inner-ear—something that’s inspired by her sister’s work as a biologist. Quinones has been learning more about D3.js  and envisions expanding on her skills to build something that would be customizable to exactly what her sister needs.

“I really enjoy the challenge of creating something, problem solving and all the stuff that comes with being a software engineer,” Quinones says.

No matter what Quinones ends up doing next, she hopes it will allow her to continue developing her understanding of software engineering, and to draw on the expertise of her community. As a person who built a communications app and teaches communication tools, Quinones believes in the power of collaboration.

“While I was going through Techtonica, I could reach over and say ‘I need help, I’m stuck,’” Quinones says. “We’re all in this together, all trying to move forward and learn more. If we can be as kind to ourselves, knowing other people would be willing to help out just like we would be willing to help, that might make it easier to stay in touch and support each other.”

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