Growing up a fan of the Montreal Canadiens living in Toronto I never got to see a lot of their games on TV. Through an 82 game season I’d see at most 10 in a season depending on how often SRC showed a game or when they played the Leafs.
Then came along RDS, the french TSN. They eventually got the rights to show all of the Canadiens’ games, I subscribed to the channel and all was well. So naturally, since I developed an affinity for the channel, when they opened their twitter account, @RDSca, I followed them right away even though everything is written in french.
Now, I did alright in highschool french class and I took the class in grade 10 even though it was no longer mandatory. So I was able to understand most of what was being tweeted, however there were times when I needed a bit of help. So for a while I had been throwing around the idea of translating the feed into english for my, and others’, benefit.
Enter @RDSinEnglish, the fully translated @RDSca twitter feed. I created a bot that pulls in the @RDSca feed, one tweet at a time, translates it into english and then posts it to the @RDSinEnglish twitter account. Right now the bot is pretty specific to those two accounts but I can pretty easily genericise it for any two accounts, and to even perform any action (not just translation). This might even be a good idea for a new service…?
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