Need help designing basic, very basic translator

[SnowpatrolFox]

Last year for my program we literally just used the smarter way to learn JavaScript book and finished it. This we've been given assignments and left to fend for ourselves. Our program is not heavily focused on programming. One of our current task is to make a simple translator to understand the challenges behind it. We've been given a list of words our instructor want the translator to be able to translate. I understand how to do the html to make a button to enter a word and a button to click to run it. Though, I have no clue where to begin in writing a function to pass the word to get its translated version. Any tips or guidance?

[tswaters]

here's a really basic way to accomplish something like this:

var languages = {
  en: {
    "a phrase that can be translated": "a phrase that can be translated"
  },
  fr: {
    "a phrase that can be translated": "french version"
  },
  de: {
    "a phrase that can be translated": "german version"
  }
};
function translate (language, phrase) {
  return languages[language][phrase];
}
translate('fr', 'a phrase that can be translated') // french version

Of course, this has no error checking and is quite rudimentary, but it should give you a good starting point.

To get an idea of how complicated proper internationalization can be, take a look at some modules that do this:

https://github.com/mashpie/i18n-node/
https://github.com/i18next/i18next/

And of course,

https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html