Organizations often offer support in multiple languages and say “contact us for translations.” However, customers who do not speak the predominant language often do not know if translations are available or how to request them. This can lead to a 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 post, we share how we identified these challenges and overcame them through our work with Swindon Town Hall. We developed the document translation application, which uses amazon Translate, to address these issues. The application is a business user application for self-service translations. The app is created in partnership with Swindon Council and is published as freely available open source code for your organization to use.
Translation challenges
We identify three key challenges:
- Precision and quality
- Cost of translating
- Time to translate
Precision and quality
The accuracy and quality of the translation are essential, because the results must be accurate and understandable. As quoted in the Swindon Council case study:
“The council has carried out small-scale trials with leading digital translation providers who can support the different languages spoken by the citizens of Swindon. “We recruited local bilingual volunteers to evaluate the quality of machine translations compared to their native languages, 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 fluent translations. It supports many languages and dialects, providing extensive coverage to customers around the world. Custom terminology, a feature of amazon Translate, is used dynamically in the application workflow when a language has matching custom terminology available.
Cost of translating
The high costs of manual translation can prevent organizations from supporting multiple languages, putting pressure on already tight budgets. Balancing linguistic inclusion and budget constraints poses a significant challenge when relying solely on traditional translation methods.
Swindon Council paid around £159.81 ($194.32 USD) per single-page document, limiting itself to providing translation only when legally required. As discussed in the case study, Swindon Council slashed 99.96% of translation costs using amazon Translate:
“These dramatic savings mean that you are no longer limited to translating only the documents you are required to provide by law, but can offer citizens broader access to content for minimal additional cost.”
Clients report that fees for third-party translation services are a significant cost. amazon Translate's neural machine translation technology dramatically reduces these costs.
Following the cost optimization pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework led to implementing an AWS Graviton architecture using AWS Lambda and an infrequently accessed amazon DynamoDB table class. With no server management overhead or constantly running systems, this helps keep costs down.
Time to translate
Manual translation delays that reduce customer satisfaction also include internal processes, approvals and logistical arrangements put in place to control costs and protect confidential and proprietary content. Swindon Council stated that response times could take up to 17 days:
“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 to 5 days. That meant that the total translation time for a document was up to 17 days.”
This application offers a self-service portal for business users for document translations. Users can upload documents and download translations to share without time-consuming manual intervention. amazon Translate can perform translations in about 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 dynamics 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 amplify JS The library for React simplifies authentication, security, and API requests.
Fig.1 – Translate a document.
Fig.2 – Localized user interface.
Fig.3 – General description 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 enables rapid development and reduces ongoing management overhead, as shown in the following diagram.
Fig.4 – General description of the translation architecture.
The application is built with infrastructure as code (IaC) using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). 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. Coupled with a consistent continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process, deployments are predictable. Reusable components are extracted into builds and imported when needed, providing consistency and best practices, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, amazon CloudWatch logging, and AWS x-Ray tracing for all Lambda functions.
Fig.5 – Overview of the continuous integration and delivery process.
Application Deployment
The application can be easily deployed using AWS CDK. AWS CDK allows you to model the entire stack, including frontend React code, backend functions and workflows, and cloud infrastructure definitions packaged together.
Before deployment, review any prerequisites you may want to usehow to connect this to your organization's single sign-on with the SAML Provider.
He installation wizard provides the necessary commands. AWS CloudShell allows you to run these commands without installing anything locally. He application documentation covers all the advanced options available. Installation takes 30-60 minutes and is monitored from AWS CodePipeline.
Fig.6 – Installation wizard.
A self-paced immersion day is available for your technical teams to gain hands-on experience with services and build core components. Alternatively, your AWS account team can provide you with personalized guidance through the workshop.
Additional feature: Simply readable
This application is designed with multiple features (at the time of writing, Document Translation and Simply Readable). Simply Readable lets you create easy-to-read documents with generative artificial intelligence (ai) using amazon Bedrock. The app can be installed with or without this feature.
Conclusion
The document translation app provides translations in your clients' native languages. amazon Translate enables accurate translation at scale. Communicating in your customers' language shows respect, improves understanding, and builds trust.
Translation capabilities should be critical to any growth strategy, generating loyalty and revenue through superior localized experiences.
Business leaders should evaluate solutions like amazon Translate to overcome language barriers and share their brand. Enable multilingual communication broadcasts “We value you, we listen to you and we want your experience with us to be positive.”
For more information about the application, see the Frequently asked questions.
About the Author
Philip Whiteside is a Solutions Architect (SA) at amazon Web Services. Philip is passionate about overcoming barriers through the use of technology.
