AI Development – Azure AI Translations

Client Overview

The client operates an extensive inventory management system and requires multilingual capabilities to support their global user base. With a catalog of over 1.2 million products, the current system only provides product information in English, limiting accessibility for non-English-speaking customers.

Challenge

Development costs for adding translations can be significant, especially when implemented after initial development. Retroactively incorporating translations often results in extensive time and resource expenditures, sometimes making it an unfeasible task. Even with 10,000 language keys, each key still requires an initial translation, leading to substantial expenses and logistical challenges.

Solution

To address the high costs and inefficiencies associated with retroactive translation, we implemented a strategy that integrates translations from the start. By designing the solution with a “translations-first” mindset, each translation functions as a key-value pair, parsed directly by the front-end. This approach streamlines the process, allowing the system to dynamically handle multilingual content without requiring pre-completed translations for every language key.

We leveraged Azure AI to perform real-time translation at the browser level, ensuring that translations are generated on the fly as users access the content. This not only reduces the upfront workload but also ensures that older records can be seamlessly displayed in the appropriate language alongside new ones. The system’s ability to translate both existing and incoming data on demand provides flexibility and cost savings, enabling a scalable, user-friendly solution. This approach eliminates the bottleneck of manual translation processes and empowers the platform to meet the multilingual needs of a global user base efficiently.

The solution resulted in significant development cost savings and enhanced globalization capabilities, allowing for a broader user reach and easier scalability. Language costs were greatly reduced, as there was no longer a need to pay for manual translations. Azure AI translations proved to be highly accurate, surpassing the quality of other automated tools such as Google Translate.