How other translation services work.
When most websites or apps translate their data two things happen:
The content for the page you are viewing is sent to a translation service like Google Translate.
A translation service-fee is charged and the results sent back to your web browser for display.
This style of on-demand “client side” translation has two benefits:
Access to many languages
Only get charged if someone actually uses it
The downside of typical translation services.
However, there are some drawbacks too:
The cost scales with page views. If you have a high volume of translations it can become very expensive.
It’s easy to view content with this method, but actually searching in another language is usually not an option.
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.
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 changed information.
This method opens up one of our favorite features: because our entire data is translated ahead of time, users can search the resource directory in their own language.
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:
You may pay to translate and maintain records that are not viewed very often.
The more languages you support, the more each update costs.
Savings for this method decline if your data is being updated with extreme frequency.
The sweet spot is to translate the minimum number of languages that are necessary to support your local community.
Your state or funders usually have requirements about which languages need to be supported. If they don’t, then you can get ideas for picking the right languages here: Picking the right languages for translation.
Summary.
Traditional translation services support the maximum number of languages, but have huge potential costs on a pay-per-view model.
Our method is more limited in the number of supported languages, but provides them at a lower and more consistent cost.
The biggest benefit of our method is enabling help seekers to look for help using their own language.