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Challenges
In the development and deployment of the translation tool, several significant challenges were encountered:
- Managing the budget constraints, especially for the paediatric therapy team, which was consistently overspending on translating important healthcare documents for families with young children.
- Ensuring the quality and accuracy of the translations. The council needed to ensure that the machine translation application could produce high-quality translations in a much shorter time frame.
- Technical complexities of integrating Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service from AWS, with other services for user validation and personal identifiable information (PII) needs.
Approach
The emerging technology team used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a solution that translates content more quickly, cheaply and simply than the human translation services we had been using up until then, while keeping children’s data properly protected and maintaining translation quality.
Outcomes and benefits
The success of the project that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services is a prime example of this – benefits:
- The application – simple, user-friendly design makes it accessible for all our staff.
- The speed – from as long as 19 days to get a document translated to under 15 minutes.
- The reliability – not had a single request for clarification about the documents translated.
- The cost – the annual translation costs of about £64,000 have since shrunk to £27, just 7p (less than 10 cents) per machine-translated document.
- The council – did not have to invest any capital upfront, beyond the time of our tech team.
Lessons learnt
The positive effect of this project extends far beyond the time and money saved by Swindon Borough Council. We have open-sourced our translate solution and it can be applied to organisations with similar challenges all over the world – not just other local authorities, but also hospitals, schools, central governments, charitable organisations, and private sector enterprises. Inspecting bodies in the UK, including the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), have praised the solution, while those in our justice system have praised it for supporting inclusion and accessibility.