Albaola QR

The experimental app used in the museum Albaola to offer multilingual content.

Albaola QR is a QR reader app developed for the museum of Albaola, the Sea Factory of the Basques. This app is able to scan any QR code with a web address in it but it is more useful when used in the museum.

Why?

Because when a QR code of the museum is scanned, it will open the content of the museum in the language Albaola QR is set to. The content boards at the museum have already content in 4 languages: Basque, Spanish, English and French. However, in order to provide a better experience for those who don't speak those languages or prefer to access the content in their own language, the content is available in another 16 languages including Catalan, Welsh, Danish, German, Finnish, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Corean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Chinese.

The app is available in all 20 languages mentioned above and when opening it for the first time it will prompt you to pick the language you would like to use. Once you do that, every Albaola QR code you scan with Albaola QR will show you the appropiate content in the language you chose.

How do we create that multilingual content?

Well, we do not know all those languages so we offer human-written content in Basque, Spanish, English and French, and machine translated content for the remaining languages. The service used to make that happen is Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/). Of course, even though Machine Translation technologies have greatly improved they are still far from perfect. That is why we like to call this an experimental app. The gist of this app is to help users understand what is being exhibited in the museum, no matter their mother tongue, but, unfortunately, we can not guarantee full comprenhension of the translated content.

Additionally, all supported languages (excluding Basque, Galician and Welsh) have the option to hear the content instead of/besides reading it. That audio is machine generated using a service called VoiceRSS (http://www.voicerss.org/api/) and it is also experimental. This way, you can focus on the resources (photos, objects etc.) shown in the museum while you listen to the explanations.

About the app

Albaola QR started with the name OharEleanitzak and was one of the three components of my Dissertation. At first it was a simple QR reader, which was available in five languages: Basque, English, Spanish, French and Catalan. The other two components of the Dissertation were a WordPress website (available in the same languages of the Android app) and a WordPress plugin. The website was the place to locate all the content without any fancy design, and the plugin was used to create the machine translations and the QR codes.

Once the Dissertation was handed in, the development of the code was directed to suit the needs of Albaola. Therefore, the functionality of creating the audio was developed, and the translation process was improved. At the same time, new features were added to Albaola QR in order to make it look better, besides adding new languages to the app and the website until reaching the current 20 supported languages.

Acknowledgements

Most of the texts of the app have been translated with Google Translate but there have been some cases in which it has been done by friends and acquaintances, who were ready to help with the task. Therefore, I would like to thank Isaac (Catalan), Frauke (German), Phillipe and Sebas (French), Julie (Welsh), Chiara (Italian) and George (Dutch) for doing the translations.