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Pi Zero Portable BILINGUAL TRANSLATOR

Electronics For You

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January 2025

This system is designed as a bilingual translator, leveraging the gTTS library to support multiple Indian languages, including English (en), Bengali (bn), Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Kannada (kn), Malayalam (ml), Marathi (mr), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te), and Urdu (ur).

- SOMNATH BERA

Pi Zero Portable BILINGUAL TRANSLATOR

The two-letter codes in brackets specify the target language for speech conversion. For example: gTTS(text=translated_ text, lang=dest_lang). Speech conversion between languages is straightforward—simply adjust the source and target language codes. For instance, Gujarati speech can be translated into Spanish by updating the relevant codes.

Additionally, Google Text-ToSpeech (gTTS) supports numerous international languages, such as Arabic (ar), Chinese Simplified (zh), Chinese Traditional (zh-tw), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), English (en), Filipino (fil), Finnish (fi), French (fr), German (de), Greek (el), Hebrew (he), Hindi (hi), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese Brazil (pt-br), Portuguese Portugal (pt), Russian (ru), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Thai (th), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), and others. The author’s prototype, featuring a 240x320 display and 5W+5W amplifiers, is shown in Fig. 1.

The testing covered English (en), Gujarati (gu), Bengali (bn), and and Hindi (hi) for Indian languages, alongside Russian (ru), Spanish (es), and German (de) for international languages. So, apart from English, Bengali, Gujarati, and Hindi, the accuracy of the outputs in other languages cannot be verified without additional feedback from expert readers.

Configuration The device requires a Raspberry Pi Zero installed with the latest Raspbian OS. Python 3 must be installed, along with the required libraries. These can be installed via the Linux terminal using the following commands:

X. Install python & pip: $> sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

1. Install gTTS (Google Text -to-Speech): $> pip install gTTS

2. Install SpeechRecognition: $> pip install SpeechRecognition

3. Install Adafruit-GPIO and Adafruit-ILI9341:

$> pip install Adafruit-GPIO

$> pip install Adafruit-ILI9341

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