Week 8: HILITE 2.0 (I still haven't come up with a creative name)

Hi! This week, I’ve been repeatedly attempting to deploy my app, featuring several happy little obstacles—apparently, what works locally will not necessarily work in deployment.

First, Some Reading

In studies on language education, there’s a term that defines the dominance of a second language (L2) over a native language (L1) due to differences in exposure and availability in a child’s daily life. Subtractive bilingualism is unfortunately common among immigrant children, even when their country of residence is diverse or prevalent with their native culture. In Miami, where the Spanish language and Latin-American cultures socioeconomically thrive, Spanish is in decline among second and third generations of immigrant families.

Toppelberg and Collins (2010) indicated that acculturative stress—demands from the second culture/language that overwhelm the development of L1—exacerbates subtractive bilingualism. In young children, many of these demands may come from their school, particularly when L1 is still the dominant language in their household. What’s more, Tabors (2002) found that preschool children immersed in an L2-dominant environment undergo a nonverbal period that risks being misinterpreted as behavioral or learning issues.

It seems education plays a major role in creating a supportive environment (or lack thereof) for children’s dual-language development. I’ve recently been able to contact some local primary school directors about my project. While my initial goal was to limit my interviews/surveying to the children and their parents for platform-testing, I now aim to conduct some interviews with primary school faculty as well. Understanding how they handle bilingual development, as well as the applications they envision with automated picturebook translation/transcreation, would be instrumental in shaping the platform’s future development.

(Also, a few potential subjects have just cancelled on me. I am in dire need of more people to interact with for platform analysis.)

Ok, going back to deployment…

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

For my platform, the frontend and backend are hosted on different domains (deployed on Render). To integrate them, or enable my frontend to communicate with the backend for tasks like translation, image-editing, uploading materials to the DB, I’m using something called cross-origin resource sharing (CORS): a mechanism that allows servers to accept requests from different “origins.” CORS enables my backend to accept requests from the frontend after I add my frontend’s domain as an accepted “origin” in the backend’s HTTP response header.

When I first deployed my platform, none of the requests from the client-side were going through because I had ✨forgotten ✨to add the new deployed domain to the backend list of allowed origins. Interestingly, even “fixing” the issue, development logs continued to throw CORS errors.

Plot Twist: The Errors Lied

The real problem was with the memory limitations of Render’s free deployment plan. Due to the memory needed to load the models for text-detection and OCR, alongside the extra cost of retrieving and storing pages, Render kept shutting down the deployment server without completing the requests. From the client-side, this registered as a CORS issue.

The solution? Painfully upgrading my Render plan. I am now short of $25 a month 🙁

A Happy Ending

My platform is deployed and (somewhat) functional!! Check it out here https://storybook-transcreation-1.onrender.com

References

Toppelberg, C. O., & Collins, B. A. (2010). Language, Culture, and Adaptation in Immigrant Children. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 19(4), 697–717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chc.2010.07.003

Sedivy, Julie. (2021). Memory speaks: on losing and reclaiming language and self. Harvard University Press.

Pease-Alvarez, C., & Vasquez, O. (1994). Language socialization in ethnic minority communities. Educating second language children: The whole child, the whole curriculum, the whole community, 82-102.

Tse, L. (2001). Resisting and reversing language shift: Heritage-language resilience among US native biliterates. Harvard educational review, 71(4), 676-709.

Tabors, P. O. (2002). One child, two languages. PH Brookes.