Organizations often offer support in multiple languages with “Ask for translations.” However, customers who don't speak your primary language often don't know that translation is available or how to request one. This can lead to poor customer experience and loss of business. A better approach is to proactively provide information in multiple languages for customers to access directly. This results in more informed, satisfied, and inclusive customers.
In this post, we share how we identified and overcame these challenges through our collaboration with Swindon Borough Council. To address these issues, we developed a document translation app that uses Amazon Translate. This app is a business user app for self-service translation. The app was created in partnership with Swindon Council and has been released as open source code for organizations to use freely.
Translation challenges
We identified three key challenges.
- precision and quality
- Translation costs
- time to translate
precision and quality
The accuracy and quality of the translation is very important, as the result must be accurate and understandable. As quoted in the Swindon Borough Council case study:
“The City Council ran a small trial with a leading digital translation provider that can support the different languages spoken by Swindon residents. Local bilingual volunteers were recruited to assess the quality of machine translation to their native languages. As a result, Amazon Translate came out on top.”
The Document Translation app uses Amazon Translate to perform translations. Amazon Translate provides high-quality document translations that are context-sensitive, accurate, and fluent. It supports many languages and dialects and provides a wide range of services to customers around the world. Custom terms, a feature of Amazon Translate, are dynamically utilized by your app's workflow when a language has a matching custom term available.
Translation costs
The high cost of manual translation can prevent organizations from supporting multiple languages, putting a strain on their already tight budgets. Balancing linguistic comprehensiveness and budget constraints is a major challenge when relying solely on traditional translation methods.
Swindon Borough Council limited itself to providing translations only where legally required and paid approximately £159.81 (US$194.32) per single page document. As explained in our case study, Swindon Borough Council reduced translation costs by 99.96% using Amazon Translate.
“Such dramatic cost reductions mean we are no longer limited to translating only the documents we are legally required to provide.Providing the public with broader access to content at minimal additional cost. You will be able to do it.”
Customers report that third-party translation service fees are a major expense. Amazon Translate's neural machine translation technology significantly reduces these costs.
Following the cost optimization pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we have further implemented an AWS Graviton architecture using AWS Lambda and infrequently accessed Amazon DynamoDB table classes. Costs are kept low because there is no server management overhead or continuous running of the system.
time to translate
Manual translation delays that reduce customer satisfaction also include internal processes, approvals, and logistical arrangements in place to control costs and protect sensitive and private content. Swindon Borough Council says delivery times could take up to 17 days.
“First, it was slow. The internal process required manual input from various people. On average, this process took up to 12 days, and the translation agency needed 3 to 5 days. , the total translation time for the document was up to 17 days.”
This app provides business users with a self-service portal for document translation. Users can upload documents, download and share translations without time-consuming manual intervention. Amazon Translate can perform a translation in about 10 minutes.
Solution overview
The app's business user portal is a browser-based UI translated into all languages and dialects supported by Amazon Translate. Dynamic React UI requires no server software. To accelerate development, UI components such as buttons and input boxes are provided from the AWS Cloudscape Design library. To interact with AWS services, the AWS Amplify JS library for React simplifies authentication, security, and API requests.
Figure 1 – Document translation.
Figure 2 – Localized user interface.
Figure 3 – Client architecture overview.
The backend uses several serverless, event-driven AWS services, including AWS Step Functions for low-code workflows, AWS AppSync for GraphQL APIs, and Amazon Translate. This architecture enables rapid development and reduces ongoing management overhead, as shown in the following diagram.
Figure 4 – Translation architecture overview.
This app 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 for modeling and provisioning cloud applications. The Typescript CDK provides a reliable, reproducible, and extensible deployment foundation. Combined with a consistent continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, deployments become predictable. Reusable components are extracted into your configuration and imported as needed to ensure 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. Offers.
Figure 5 – Overview of continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.
Introducing the app
AWS CDK makes it easy to deploy your app. AWS CDK allows you to model your entire stack, including front-end React code, back-end functionality and workflows, and cloud infrastructure definitions packaged together.
Before you deploy, review the prerequisites you need to use it, including connecting it to your organization's single sign-on with a SAML provider.
The installation wizard provides the necessary commands. AWS CloudShell allows you to run these commands without installing anything locally. The app documentation describes all available advanced options. Installation takes 30-60 minutes and is monitored from AWS CodePipeline.
Figure 6 – Installation wizard.
Tech teams can use self-paced immersion days to gain hands-on experience with the service and build core components. Alternatively, your AWS account team can provide personalized guidance through workshops.
Additional features: Simple and easy to read
This app is designed with multiple features (as of this writing, documentation translation and easy reading). Simply Readable lets you create Easy Read documents with generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered by Amazon Bedrock. Apps can be installed with or without this feature.
conclusion
The Document Translation app provides translations in your customers' native language. Amazon Translate enables accurate translation at scale. By communicating in your customer's language, you demonstrate respect, improve understanding, and build trust.
Translation capabilities should be at the core of any growth strategy, building loyalty and revenue through great localized experiences.
Business leaders should evaluate solutions like Amazon Translate to overcome language barriers and share their brand.Realization of multilingual communication “We value you, we listen to you, and we want your experience with us to be a positive one.”
For more information about the app, please see our FAQ.
About the author
philip whiteside I'm a Solutions Architect (SA) at Amazon Web Services. Philip is passionate about leveraging technology to overcome barriers.
