A popular online multiplayer word game (the French version of Scattergories)
built with React and Node.js. The game grew organically to 98k+ active users
over 3 years, driven almost entirely by SEO and word-of-mouth.
Listenbourg started as a viral French internet phenomenon in November 2022 —
a fictional country imagined collectively online, which quickly grew into a
collaborative cultural project. A community of contributors built an entire
ecosystem around it: an interactive map, an identity card generator, a
constructed language (Listenbourgeois), and the open source translator I
worked on. The phenomenon reached national media coverage, including a
tongue-in-cheek weather forecast on TF1 by meteorologist
Tatiana Silva, as well as segments on France 3 and France Info.
Designed and implemented the translation algorithm matching French input to Listenbourgeois with a scoring system that returns a primary translation and ranked alternatives
Built the Node.js / Express backend exposing the public POST and GET /translate endpoints consumed by the community frontend
Developed the words database API (Traducteur-DB-API) used to add, edit and serve translated entries to contributors
Collaborated remotely with a distributed team of developers, linguists and designers organising the work across the Listenbourg GitHub organisation
Why it matters
Real-world experience shipping production code as part of an open source collective rather than as a solo developer
Translation engine had to gracefully handle a constructed, evolving vocabulary — emphasis on fuzzy matching and confidence scoring rather than strict dictionary lookups
Public API consumed by an independent frontend team, requiring clear contracts, versioning discipline and documentation
