Making your systems multi-lingual, made easy!?!

If you follow my blogs, you may remember me writing about the Welsh Language Measure and how a slew of organisations will need to become compliant with them over the coming years. This includes many parts of the Welsh Public Sector, a variety of public bodies and organisations that serve the public sector, and also a number of private sector companies serving customers in Wales such as utility companies, train companies, telecomms companies, and a range of others. The initial round of Standards were published in late 2015 for the first group of organisations, and it is likely that these will largely be used for later groups, albeit that the level of compliance required of an organisation needs to be reasonable for their sector. Nevertheless, with, for example, British Gas the only gas and electricity company that offer a full end-to-end Welsh Language Service (SSE offer bills but little more last time I checked), if other gas and electricity companies want to remain in the 1.3 million+ household Welsh market, they are going to have to reach whatever level of compliance the Welsh Language Commissioner sets.

So I was really interested last week to meet Richard Sheppard, MD of Interceptor Solutions. Interceptor have developed Linguaskin, an application that sits between your back-end computer systems and your user’s web browser that can do lots of clever things, but in particular, it can enable almost entirely seamless translation of the application presented to the user, and in most cases so far, has required no change to the underlying application. In a world that is increasingly providing user interfaces via web browsers, and with strong trends towards providing Cloud-based Platform As A Service applications direct to a wide variety of businesses and organisations, this could provide significant benefits, to organisations that need to provide multi-lingual interfaces to their customers and to their employees, and to software providers that can’t justify the effort to build or convert their application to provide a multi-lingual user interface.

For organisations subject to the Welsh Language Standards, this could be game changing. Why replace your application estate (at significant cost) if you can embed an application which provides translations seamlessly? Required to provide your intranet bi-lingually? Obviously, an intranet developed using in-built multi-lingual features is likely to be the easiest option, but if you have a legacy estate, Linguaskin could provide an easy route to inserting the second language. For private sector companies facing the threat that they may have to withdraw from the Welsh market, re-skinning your applications, website(s), bills, and so on may be vastly cheaper than reaching into those applications and trying to change, upgrade or replace them. And of course, this isn’t a “Welsh language” application, this is a “multi-lingual application”; investing in the technology may let you better serve the speakers of other languages, such as Polish, Pujabi, Urdu, Gaelic, and any other language you may want to interact with your customer base in, across the UK or indeed globally.

If you are an application provider there could well be something in Linguaskin for you as well. Want to continue to provide your application into the Welsh public sector, this could be a relatively easy way to achieve linguistic compliance and save a lost customer. It may also help you win new business, both in the sector, and in other markets where the ability for them to interact with their customers in their customer's language is an advantage. With little or no direct change to the application itself. This could well give you market advantage both with existing customers as you build a bigger moat, and also with new customers, either due to their being subject to new compliance requirements, or because they see business benefit in having a more flexible (linguistically) set of systems available to them. The Welsh Language Commissioner is unlikely to enforce a standard where no application is available in Welsh, but may well enforce on those organisations subject to the Measure if a suitable application is available. 

Richard is currently building up his client base and has some good case studies on the Linguaskin website. While I’m not a customer of his, and therefore don’t have personal knowledge of how hard or easy or effective it is to install and use Linguaskin (and therefore you need to do your own due diligence before deciding if this product is for you), I personally think it’s great to know that there’s an app out there that may just may make multi-lingual software that much more available.

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* please note that the opinions in this article are my own and not that of my employer