Show HN: I built a tool to translate and declutter articles for my immigrant mom | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a tool to translate and declutter articles for my immigrant mom

dulink.click

6 pointsdh201310 comments

Hello HN,

I built DuLink to solve a personal problem: my primary language is English, but my mother’s primary language is Mandarin Chinese. I often find articles on health or current events that I want to share with her, but the friction of copy/pasting and Google Translate meant she rarely read them.

What it does:

DuLink takes an article URL, extracts the core content to strip out clutter, and then generates a static, translated reading view. It preserves the semantic HTML structure (headers, lists) but removes the original site's JS and ad tracking.

The "Why":

Existing tools either translate the entire messy page (including nav menus/footers) or require the recipient to install an extension. I wanted something truly simple. A "fire and forget" link that removed every obstacle. No setup, no extra tools, just open and understand. I also added audio playback because reading dense text on a phone can be tiring, especially for aging eyes. Sometimes listening is simply easier.

I built this for a personal use case, but I'm sharing it here for anyone who wants to share something meaningful across languages. If it helps you bridge that gap, I'd love to hear about it.

Any feedback is welcome.

https://dulink.click/

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Tip: Add native back button functionality, e.g. by generating unique URLs for the results and putting them into the history.

Otherwise you're forced to find and click the 'Translate another article' link, which I completely missed the first three times.

Thanks for the feedback! That's definitely a UX gap. I'll work on it and push another update shortly.

I made a couple tweaks:

- Added a "copy link" button to the top of the article page - Added a "Translate another article" button to the bottom of the article page

The reason I didn't add a "back" button was because the translated article page can be shared with somebody else who may be opening the link for the first time, so seeing a "back" button in that context could be confusing.

Let me know if any of this is helpful!

Cheers!

> The reason I didn't add a "back" button was because the translated article page can be shared with somebody else who may be opening the link for the first time, so seeing a "back" button in that context could be confusing.

I didn't mean the translated page. I meant the Your translated article is ready! screen. Check out this video: https://streamable.com/utu7du

Additionally, I would suggest adding cursor-pointer to all clickable elements. That may also be part of why I did not immediately notice the Translate another article link.

Ah thanks for the clarification! I made some updates if you'd like to take a look

Very usefull! You may want to make the url input visable more understandable as textinput field :)

Thanks for the kind words! Can you clarify what you mean by making the URL input more understandable? I want to make sure I'm making the right improvements:)

Let me know when you support Thai, I have Thai In-Laws as my wife is Thai. They barely know English.

Let me look into that!

FYI Thai support has been added

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