Modernizing Language Education On The Web - The Vision

Product

I worked for several years to bring a dusty dictionary website into the 21st century. Plenty of companies that specialize in reference materials have ported their content to the web, but few have leveraged modern technology to transform a useful, but clunky, informational tool into its fullest potential.

Paper Dictionaries

A traditional dictionary is written by hundreds of specialists that catalog and define all the words in a language. A bilingual dictionary does the same for two languages while mapping them to each other. The process can easily take a decade, and by the time a new version hits the press, its contents might be culturally outdated and missing information.

As the Internet gained popularity, dictionary companies started moving online. However, as increasingly complex web applications took the stage, these online dictionaries fell behind.

The Origins of SpanishDict.com

Curiosity Media, Inc., the company behind www.SpanishDict.com, was born in the 1990s as a side project. It was one of the first resources of its kind to hit the Internet, and it easily gained a wide reach (and became strongly indexed in search engines) before many traditional dictionary companies even responded to the growing popularity of the web. Today, the website attracts over 15 million unique visitors each month, making it the most popular Spanish-English language learning tool on the Internet.

The CEO ran it as a side project for a while, and when I joined the three-person engineering team, he was expanding his company.

A New Vision

A growing team meant an opportunity to dream big and overhaul the company vision. The CEO defined the new top priorities:

  1. To get students from their question to an answer quickly and directly.

  2. To answer students’ questions with content that was more thorough and easier to understand.

  3. To serve students as a companion tool to their larger language learning goals and courses.

This vision captured something subtle but important: it let go of the site’s origins as a dictionary. Instead of being stuck with the prescriptive dictionary concept of mapping information about Spanish words to information about English words, it imagined an online hub that prioritized language learning. Answering students’ questions lay at the heart of the new vision, and this vision drove innovation on the site.

Laying the Foundation

However, the website was was trapped in its past. The database was full of licensed data from printed dictionaries that was often unstandardized (and sometimes broken) XML and HTML blocks that were hard to edit, incomplete, and outdated.

The first task in building toward the new vision was to turn a critical eye toward the current setup. We took a hard look and decided to be bold… we gave ourselves a blank slate and started from scratch.

We designed a custom bilingual dictionary data format that separated different components of a dictionary entry and recorded relationships between them. We standardized categories of entries and indicators for parts of speech, register, and region. We built metadata into the entries for the content team to use in their content creation workflow.

I implemented the new system across the stack and worked with the content team to customize a new content management system (CMS) for them.

Impact

We fundamentally rebuilt the way we created, stored, and presented our core content, and this work rippled out into the projects I worked on over the next few years. We optimized the web app in ways almost unnoticeable to the user, but that profoundly impacted users’ experience on the site. For example, instead of a user flipping through the pages of a paper dictionary to find the word they’re looking for, we assume the burden of receiving the users’ queries via the search box, interpreting their queries into questions, and connecting them to an answer. Digitizing and optimizing these tasks opened a lot of areas for innovation, including data driven content and machine translations.

In general, our solution paved the way for our content to be more thorough, more interrelated, and more reusable across the site. The site evolved away from an online approximation of a bilingual dictionary and into something subtly different and not-so-subtly more powerful as an education tool.

As an engineer, I was often immersed in the code of building new features. However, I never lost sight of how our engineering work supported the larger vision of the product, and I contributed to product work frequently. I thrived on understanding the “why” behind each engineering project and serving as a connecting point between the engineering team and other stakeholders.

Now that you’re up to speed on the larger context of my work at Curiosity Media, I invite you to check out some of the specific projects I worked on: