How typical translation works.

When you translate a typical website or web page outside Connect 211 two things happen:

1. The content for the page you are viewing is sent to a translation service like Google Translate.
2. A translation service-fee is charged and the results sent back to your web browser for display.

This is called “client side” translation. The benefits of client side translation include access to many languages on-demand, and only getting charged for that translation service if someone actually uses it.

The downside of typical translation.

However, there are some drawbacks too:

1. Because the cost scales with views, if you have a high volume of translations it can become very expensive.
2. It’s easy to view content with this method, but it’s harder to create an interactive experience. In other words, looking at a page in Spanish is one thing, but querying (or searching) a collection of pages in Spanish is much more complicated.

Connect 211 has taken a novel approach to language translation in order to best serve our primarily nonprofit clients.

How Connect 211 translates differently.

We decided to do something novel: translate the entire resource database into multiple languages up-front.

With this method we pay for translation once, and then only pay for updating translations when there’s a change.

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With Connect 211, if you translate the description for a resource today and 100 people view it, then we only get charged once instead of 100 times. If you update the description in six months, then we get charged once to update the translation, and only for the affected field.

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There other benefits too:

1. Because our entire data is translated ahead of time, it becomes much easier to query the data in other languages, something our resource directory excels at.
2. This also lays the groundwork for maintaining manually curated* translations for high-volume records. This is something we don’t support today, but it was a major concern that we allow it for the future if necessary.

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• You’ll notice I used the word “curated” instead of “translated”. Manually translating records for a high quality result may be subsiding in favor of prompting General Language Models for an improved result. However, there will still be a need to verify those results.

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How to optimize your translation bill.

Overall, we find our method is more cost effective both in terms of the translation bill and engineering time. However, there are some factors to be aware of in order to optimize your translation bill: