About Utah: A local app developer is remodeling the language barrier

Curtis and Donell Pons have the solution to your language problems at their fingertips.

Lee Benson

SALT LAKE CITY Curtis Pons was trying to figure out how to remodel a kitchen when he had his Thomas Edison moment.

Wait, thats not quite accurate.

He was trying to figure out how to tell someone else how to remodel a kitchen.

Curtis, 50, is the founder and owner of Yalecrest Building & Design, the company he started 20 years ago when he got into the construction business. Full-home remodels are his specialty. He typically runs a crew of six or seven guys, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the job.

His workers are good workers, which is great, but almost all of them speak Spanish, which is sometimes not so great.

When youre building things, communicating properly is important. Otherwise, the toilet might wind up in the den and the microwave might end up in the bathroom.

For years, Curtis has battled the language barrier. Hes used every tactic he could think of to get his point across. Sign language, hand signals, charades, mimicry, talking louder, talking slower. When the Internet got sophisticated enough to use algorithms, allowing computers to talk to other computers and take a calculated guess at what people were trying to say to each other, he tried any number of language apps, with varying degrees of success.

Then one day last summer it hit him:

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About Utah: A local app developer is remodeling the language barrier