Back to browse
Novel visualizer for translations to/from Basque language

Novel visualizer for translations to/from Basque language

by mattdeboard·Mar 7, 2026·1 point·0 comments

AI Analysis

MidNiche Gem

Basque translation breakdown visualizer, but niche to a single language and ML-wrapped pipeline.

Strengths
  • Solves a genuine learning friction point for Basque learners wanting grammatical insight into translations
  • Multi-stage pipeline (Batua MT → Stanza NLP → Claude) generates detailed alignment visualization
  • Supports four languages and bidirectional translation pairs
Weaknesses
  • Extremely narrow audience; no evidence this scales or matters beyond Basque learners
  • Depends on Claude API for data structure generation, adding latency and cost per query
Category
Target Audience

Basque language learners and linguists studying grammar transfer between language pairs

Similar To

Google Translate's word alignment · Linguee alignment view

Post Description

I made an extremely niche tool and wanted to see how fellow language learners, linguists and/or philologists (amateur or otherwise) react to it.

I've been preparing for a trip to the Basque Country later this year by learning Euskara (aka Basque). A big part of my learning process is following Euskara-language people on social media, then putting their subtitles into a machine translation service. However, since Euskara grammar is so different from that of English & Spanish, I found myself wanting to know the "how" and "why" of the translation. This visualizer scratches that itch for me.

I'm using a processing pipeline for this app that goes like: 1. Submit the input phrase to https://batua.eus (a Basque-owned & -operated machine translation service) 2. Run both the input and output through Stanford's Stanza NLP Python library 3. Pass Stanza's output to an LLM (Claude) to generate the data structure that drives the visualization.

I'm posting this knowing there are a couple limitations: 1. My API token for batua.eus is fairly limited, so now that I'm posting it to HN I expect that limitation to get hit 2. I'm risking some charges for my Claude API token, so I've had to limit folks to max 10 translations 3. I'll take this down the moment costs get out of control, tho I reckon the limited API token for batua will protect me :)

The monorepo source code can be found here https://github.com/mattdeboard/itzuli-stanza-mcp

It's split out by backend/ and frontend/. The backend has an architecture document I'm proud of. https://github.com/mattdeboard/itzuli-stanza-mcp/blob/main/b...

I've used Claude Code extensively for this project, and am very pleased with the quality I was able to coax out of it. Keeping an attitude of "senior dev mentoring a junior dev" toward Claude, and bringing my own taste/standards to the table.

Similar Projects

Open Source●●Solid

DoScript – Automation language with English-like syntax

DoScript trades shell terseness for English-like primitives (make folder, for_each file_in ...) plus safety features like a global --dry-run, typed errors (try/catch NetworkError) and rich file-loop metadata — handy for ad-hoc backups and file-sorting. The inclusion of a node-based visual IDE and a tiny installer suggests someone pushed this beyond a toy CLI, but the overall idea sits in a crowded space (PowerShell, Node-RED, AutoHotkey) so its appeal will be strongest for users who value human-readable syntax and a simple GUI.

Niche GemShip It
server-lab
203mo ago