Sandy Chu: My Internship at the Internet Archive

Sandy Chu: My Internship at the Internet Archive

This summer, continuing a years-long tradition, Open Library and the Internet Archive took part in
Google Summer of Code
(GSoC), a Google initiative focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. This year, I was lucky enough to mentor Sandy, a long-time Open Library volunteer, on an exciting project to increase the accessibility of our books with real-time translations. We have invited Sandy to speak about her experience here as we reach the culmination of the GSoC period. It was a pleasure getting to work on this exciting project with you Sandy! – Drini
My name is
Sandy Chu
and I am a 2025 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) candidate who had the opportunity to work with the amazing Internet Archive engineering team. Prior to participating in the GSoC program, I had contributed as a volunteer software engineer for the Open Library open source repo. As someone who grew up using local libraries as a place to supplement my education and read books that my school could not afford, I was drawn to the Open Library’s mission to empower book lovers and provide a free, valuable resource to all. You can view my initial proposal
here
.
Coming soon in September, the Open Library will be able to better serve its global audience to access books that were previously not available due to a lack of localization. With the help of open source projects such as the
Mozilla Firefox Translation Models
and
Bergamot Translator
library, a new BookReader plugin will have the ability to leverage a user’s browser and hardware resources to toggle translations from a book’s original language to a translation in their language. Additionally, the translated text will also work with the ReadAloud feature to read books in the translated language.
The “Real-Time In-Browser Book Translation w/ Read Aloud (TTS)” project closely aligns with the Open Library’s 2025 goal of providing more with less. Although the Internet Archive hosts and provides its patrons with hundreds of thousands of publicly available works, patrons are limited to a subset of works that were published in their native language. Due to the unique image based implementation of the BookReader application, default browser translator options are not viable for many readers, so this project presents an opportunity to make a big impact for international audiences.
Currently in internal beta, the translation plugin allows patrons to quickly initiate a local translator on-their device and translate the book’s text in just a few seconds per page. With nine distinct languages available for translation from English (and potentially over 40 as we update to Mozilla’s
latest models
), this project will make countless works more accessible for patrons.
The primary goals of this project were:
Translating a book’s original text content to the patron’s desired language with minimal delay or disruption
Creating a visually seamless experience to maint…