I Built a Tool That Translates Meaning — Not Words

A call for testers, native speakers, and developers who want to help preserve languages before they disappear. It Started With an Ice Cream I walked barefoot through Denmark in short trousers, bought an ice cream cone, and wrote about it. Then I ran it through SOUL. A few seconds later I had the same story in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Low German. Plattdeutsch. A language I barely speak anymore. Words I hadn't heard in decades. But when I read them aloud, they came back. The sound unlocked something. That's when I knew this was working. What SOUL Actually Does Most translation tools work at the word level. Word in → word out. SOUL works at the concept level. Before any translation happens, SOUL builds a dictionary of meanings, not words. Each concept gets its own entry: Concept { id: "longing-de" note: "Sehnsucht — transcendent longing. No English equivalent." dynamic: piano tempo: largo de: "Sehnsucht" es: "añoranza" ca: "enyorança" en: "Sehnsucht" nds: "Sehnsucht" pt: "saudade"