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
The translation engine had to handle a constructed, still-moving vocabulary, so it relies 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
