Organizations often offer support in multiple languages, saying “contact us for translations.” However, customers who don't speak the primary language often don't know that translations are available or how to request them. This can lead to poor customer experience and loss of business. A better approach is to proactively provide information in multiple languages so customers can access it directly. This leads to more informed, satisfied and included customers.
In this article, we share how we identified these challenges and overcame them through our work with Swindon Borough Council. We have developed the Document Translation application, which uses Amazon Translate, to solve these problems. The app is a professional user application for self-service translations. The app is created in partnership with Swindon Council and released as open source code freely available to your organisation.
Translation challenges
We have identified three key challenges:
- Precision and quality
- Translation cost
- It's time to translate
Precision and quality
Translation accuracy and quality are essential, as the results must be precise and understood. As cited in the Swindon Borough Council Case Study:
“The council has been carrying out small-scale trials with leading digital translation providers capable of supporting the different languages spoken by the citizens of Swindon. The company recruited local bilingual volunteers to evaluate the quality of machine translations against their native language, and Amazon Translate came out on top.
The Document Translation app uses Amazon Translate to perform translations. Amazon Translate provides high-quality document translations for contextual, accurate, and smooth translations. It supports many languages and dialectsproviding broad coverage to customers around the world. Custom Terminology, a feature of Amazon Translate,is dynamically used by the application workflow when a language has matching custom terminology.
Translation cost
The high costs of manual translation can prevent organizations from supporting multiple languages, straining already tight budgets. Balancing linguistic inclusiveness and budgetary limitations poses a significant challenge when relying solely on traditional translation methods.
Swindon City Council paid approximately £159.81 (US$194.32) per single-page document, limiting it to providing a translation only when required by law. As noted in the case study, Swindon Council reduced translation costs by 99.96% using Amazon Translate:
“These significant savings mean it no longer limits itself to translating only the documents it is legally required to provide: it can offer citizens wider access to content at minimal additional cost. »
Customers report third-party translation service fees as a major cost. THE neural machine translation Amazon Translate's technology significantly reduces these costs.
According to the Cost Optimization pillar of Well-Architected AWS Framework further led to the implementation of a AWS Graviton architecture using AWS Lambda and rarely access Amazon DynamoDB table class. With no server management fees or continuously running systems, this keeps costs low.
It's time to translate
Manual translation delays that decrease customer satisfaction also include internal processes, approvals and logistical arrangements put in place to control costs and protect sensitive and private content. Swindon Borough Council said that turnaround times can take up to 17 days:
“At first it was slow. The internal process required manual input from many different people. On average, this process took up to 12 days, and the time required by the translation agency was 3-5 days. This meant that the total time to translate a document could be up to 17 days.
This application provides a self-service portal to business users for document translations. Users can upload documents and translations to share without slow manual intervention. Amazon Translate can complete translations in around 10 minutes.
Solution Overview
The app's Business User Portal is a browser-based user interface that has been translated into all languages and dialects supported by Amazon Translate. The dynamic React The user interface does not require server software. To speed up development, user interface components such as buttons and input boxes come from the AWS Cloudscape design library. To interact with AWS services, the AWS AmplifyJS The library for React simplifies authentication, security, and API requests.
![Document translation demo](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/720.gif)
Fig.1 – Translate a document.
![Multilingual user interface](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/multi_lang.png)
Fig.2 – Localized user interface.
![Customer presentation](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/overview_client.png)
Fig.3 – Presentation of the client architecture.
The backend uses several serverless and event-driven AWS services, including AWS Step Functions for low-code workflows, AWS AppSync for a GraphQL API and Amazon Translate. This architecture allows for rapid development and reduces ongoing management overhead, as shown in the following diagram.
![Translation overview](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/overview_translation.png)
Fig.4 – Presentation of the translation architecture.
The application is built with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using the AWS Cloud SDK (AWSCDK). The AWS CDK is an open source software development framework used to model and provision cloud applications. Using the Typescript CDK provides a reliable, repeatable, and extensible foundation for deployments. Combined with a consistent continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, deployments are predictable. Reusable components are extracted into builds and imported as necessary, ensuring consistency and best practices such as AWS Identity and Access Management (I AM), Amazon CloudWatch logging, and AWS X-rays tracing for all Lambda functions.
![Pipeline Overview](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/pipeline.png)
Fig.5 – Overview of the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.
Application deployment
The application is easy to deploy using the AWS CDK. The AWS CDK allows you to model the entire stack, including frontend React code, backend functions and workflows, and cloud infrastructure definitions bundled together.
Before deployment, review everything prerequisites you might want to usefor example by connecting it to your organization's single sign-on with the SAML Provider.
THE Installation Wizard provides the necessary commands. AWS CloudShell allows you to run these commands without installing anything locally. THE application documentation covers all available advanced options. Installation takes 30-60 minutes and is monitored from AWS CodePipeline.
![Installation Options Form](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2024/04/16/wizard.png)
Fig.6 – Installation wizard.
A day of immersion at your own pace is available for your technical teams to gain hands-on experience with services and build core components. Alternatively, your AWS account team can provide personalized guidance throughout the workshop.
Additional functionality: Simply readable
This application is designed with several features (at the time of writing, document translation and simply readable). Simply Readable lets you create Easy Read documents with generative artificial intelligence (AI) using Amazonian substrate. The application can be installed with or without this feature.
Conclusion
The Document Translation app provides translations into your customers' native languages. Amazon Translate enables accurate translation at scale. Communicating in the customers' language shows respect, improves understanding and builds trust.
Translation capabilities should be at the heart of any growth strategy, building loyalty and generating revenue through superior localized experiences.
Business leaders should evaluate solutions like Amazon Translate to overcome language barriers and share their brand. Enabling multilingual communication transmits “We value you, we hear you, and we want your experience with us to be positive. »
To learn more about the app, visit FAQs.
About the Author
Philippe Whiteside is a Solutions Architect (SA) at Amazon Web Services. Philip is passionate about overcoming obstacles using technology.