## Story 001: Monolingual book club member exchanges messages with German-speaking friend

**Persona:** Sarah, 47, retired teacher in Bristol, native English speaker, has never used translation tools before. She's joining a cross-border book club and wants to follow the chat without feeling lost.

**Situation:**

Sarah has been invited to a Discord-like book club that includes German readers. She can read German slowly but conversation moves too fast. She's worried she'll miss jokes or nuance, and embarrassed to ask people to slow down.

**Need:**

As Sarah, I want to see German messages appear in English in real time as they arrive, so that I can follow the conversation at natural pace without missing cultural context.

**Acceptance:**
- When a German speaker sends a message, Sarah sees the English translation appear within 2-3 seconds
- The translation feels conversational, not robotic (idioms translate as idioms, not word-for-word)
- Sarah can see both the original German and the English translation, so she can check if a joke landed the way the speaker intended
- Sarah can send English messages that German speakers receive as German, without her having to think about translation

**Tier:** core

**Confusion-flags:**
- I'm uncertain whether 'real time' means 2 seconds or 200ms — the difference probably matters for conversation feel, but I don't know the translation latency yet
- I wrote 'feels conversational' but that's subjective — what does 'good translation' look like in practice for idioms and tone? This might be a fast-follow refinement rather than v1
- I'm assuming Sarah wants to see both original and translation. That might be wrong — maybe she only wants English and trusts the translation. Or maybe seeing both is cognitive overload. This needs testing.
