Academics
TranslateDojo
A German saying about a train station really means 'it's all Greek to me.' Spanish 'embarazada' means pregnant, not embarrassed. Vietnamese uses four different words for 'I' that English flattens into one. Translation is never a swap of equal words - every rendering trades something away. Predict what a word-for-word version breaks, reveal the faithful one, then translate it back and measure the drift. Every phrase is human-authored - no machine translation. A tiny, deterministic translation-loss engine, no internet. Ages 15-18.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 25 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
#2b6cb0 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
TranslateDojo's crew ARE the kinds of loss a translation can suffer - the cast IS the curriculum: each character IS one way meaning slips between languages. Literal renders every word faithfully and is the first to fall apart on an idiom. Idiom is the saying whose picture (a train station, a staircase) makes no sense until you know the meaning behind it. Drift is what changes when you translate the good English back to the source - usually the image, sometimes the whole concept. Boomerang is the round trip itself: send a phrase across and back and name what returned changed. Nuance, the mentor, is the calm translator who never asks 'what are the words?' - only 'what did this lose, and does it matter here?' The bank is human-authored from verified examples (con/em/cháu/tôi, embarazada, l'esprit de l'escalier) - NO machine translation is ever run (the Wall Rule). For ages 15-18 (no illustrated cast) - flat, deterministic on-device translation-loss reasoning ships now, nothing leaves the device.
Literal
The word-for-word rendering - faithful to every word, and the first to turn an idiom into nonsense
Idiom
The fixed saying whose literal picture is meaningless until you know what it stands for
Drift
What changes in a translation - the image, the register, the relationship - the features a faithful translator names on purpose
Boomerang
The back-translation round trip - send a phrase to the source and back, and see exactly what returned changed
Nuance
The translator who measures a translation by meaning kept and meaning lost, never by matching words
What's inside
Learning goal
A German saying about a train station really means 'it's all Greek to me.' Spanish 'embarazada' means pregnant, not embarrassed. Vietnamese uses four different words for 'I' that English flattens into one. Translation is never a swap of equal words - every rendering trades something away. Predict what a word-for-word version breaks, reveal the faithful one, then translate it back and measure the drift. Every phrase is human-authored - no machine translation. A tiny, deterministic translation-loss engine, no internet. Ages 15-18.
Mentored by Nuance — no data leaves the device.
How TranslateDojo handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages