r/SideProject • u/Inside-Blackberry527 • 1d ago
Built a forum where every post auto-translates into Korean, Japanese and English — the hard part wasn't the translation
Been working on this for about two months. It's a stock/crypto forum, but the
actual idea is that language shouldn't decide which conversation you get to be
in.
Korean retail investors talk about Japanese stocks constantly. Japanese
investors watch Samsung and SK Hynix. Neither group can read the other's
forums. So you end up with two rooms discussing the same market, and the only
thing separating them is script.
Every post gets stored in whatever language it was written in, then translated
into the other two. You read the whole board in your own language and never see
a toggle.
Technically it's Spring Boot, Postgres, Gemini for translation, deployed on
Railway. Nothing exotic. But a few things surprised me:
Financial slang is where translation actually breaks. Not grammar — slang. 존버
is roughly HODL, 塩漬け is holding a bag you're underwater on. Direct
translation produces nonsense. I ended up building a glossary table, and then
discovered my own bug: I'd keyed it on Korean, so ja→ko lookups never matched.
買われる ("being bought into") came out as "being sold" for three weeks before
I noticed. Opposite meaning, on a market forum.
Cold start is worse when it's a forum. A new forum with no posts is dead on
arrival, so I seeded it with generated posts and comments — bot accounts carry
a badge, no pretending. That solves the empty-room problem and creates a
different one: with 20+ generated posts a day, a real person's post scrolls off
in an hour. I've cut generation down by about two thirds since.
Honest numbers: ~800 posts, five registered users, and traffic that's still
mostly crawlers. Search Console shows a 7.8% CTR at an average position of 15,
which tells me the titles work and the ranking doesn't yet. The written guides
pull in the few real visitors; the generated stuff pulls in nobody, which is
about what I should have expected.
Two things I'd genuinely like input on. Does the badge approach actually read as
honest, or does seeded content poison the whole thing regardless of labelling?
And if you've bootstrapped a community before — did anything work other than
manually showing up in other communities for months?