About 10alect
A community-powered tool for learning languages through music 🎵
What is 10alect?
10alect helps you understand songs in foreign languages by providing word-by-word translations and morpheme breakdowns.
Unlike regular translations that give you sentence-level meanings, we align every source word with its translation counterpart. It's perfect for understanding grammar, idioms, and word structures!
🚧 Just a Side Project
I built 10alect because I wanted it to exist. It's currently running on a modest global VPS that costs about $10/month (not huge servers!).
Paid support isn't a business model yet—it's an "indicator" that you find this useful and want me to keep working on it (and it buys credit for the premium DeepL API!).
⚙️ How It Works
OPUS-MT (Free)
Fast, open-source neural translation. Good quality. Uses daily Energy.
DeepL (Premium)
Industry-leading quality. Uses Gems (paid/earned).
Song analyses happen in our background queue system and are saved forever!
🔬 Under the Hood
- ▪️ Awesome Align: BERT-based word alignment model
- ▪️ spaCy: Morpheme analysis (roots, affixes)
- ▪️ DeepL API: For the premium translations
- ▪️ SvelteKit + FastAPI: The tech stack
- ▪️ SQLite (WAL): Crazy fast caching
Keeping it Running 🏃♂️
Since this is a side project, I want to keep the costs manageable while still offering high-quality tools.
The setup is simple: The server itself is cheap (~$10/mo), but the DeepL API charges per character translated.
That's why high-quality translations cost "Gems", while the standard ones just use "Energy" (which refills for free daily).
Supporters (€3/mo)
Get 3x daily Energy + a monthly Gem stipend. It mostly just helps cover the small server bill!
Gem Packs
Directly fund your usage of the DeepL API if you want premium translations for every song.
🎓 Use Cases
- ✅ Word-by-word grammar breakdown
- ✅ Vocabulary interaction in context
- ✅ Finding idioms that don't translate literally
- ✅ Pronunciation practice with synced lyrics
🌍 Languages
Start Deconstructing Songs
No signup required to browse the library. Join for free to analyze new songs!