‘I was not able to find the words’: real-time translation app a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur created to text with his parents finds wide audience

Canadian-born entrepreneur Josh Gao’s limited written Chinese held back his ability to express himself. He co-created an app that translates texts in real time

The app, Binko, keeps the original text – in whatever language – adds context and interprets slang properly. It’s had 10,000 downloads, and positive feedback

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Because of his limited written Chinese vocabulary, Josh Gao couldn’t express himself while texting his parents (above with Gao), so he co-created the translation app Binko. It has been downloaded over 10,000 times so far and received strong positive feedback. Photo: Binko

Published: 7:15pm, 6 May 2023

Although Canadian-born Chinese entrepreneur Josh Gao’s Mandarin is good enough to have a casual conversation with his parents, he struggles when it comes to texting them, resorting to simple sentences like asking if they have eaten yet and posting mostly pictures of food.

The 24-year-old felt his limited Chinese vocabulary hindered his ability to express his feelings to his parents.

“They’re getting past their sixties now, and there are some conversations I would really love to have with them before they pass away, like asking, ‘What is your relationship with that [death]?’ ‘How are you thinking about life right now?’ Things like that,” Gao says in a video interview from Toronto.

“And I wasn’t able to talk to them about it, I was not able to find the words.”

Josh Gao (pictured in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and his tech-savvy friends created Binko, a real-time translation app that could also interpret slang and colloquialisms. Photo: Binko

So he and his tech-savvy friends set to work creating a real-time translation app that could also interpret slang and colloquialisms in a natural way, unlike Google Translate which can be too literal, and WeChat, which he says is robotic.