To remedy this, human translators can create dictionaries of these special cases and help to train the NMTS to improve future translation. Some phrases that are common on Chicago websites, like acronyms or department names, may be mistranslated by an out-of-the-box NMTS. Translating web content isn’t as easy as flipping a switch – while new neural machine translation services (NMTS) can translate text quickly with some accuracy, there are certain caveats. The City of Chicago has an enormous amount of digital content across a number of different websites. However, there is a trade-off between quality and speed: machine translation services like Google Translate provide translation nearly instantaneously, while human translation takes longer.

A high quality of translation requires human translation or human proofreading of computer translation. The City of Chicago has a number of translation options available, ranging in quality, speed, and price. As a result, the City of Chicago is developing a web content translation strategy for the six most commonly spoken languages in Chicago: English, Spanish, Polish, Arabic, Mandarin, and Tagalog. The new administration is pushing for better compliance with a 2015 language access ordinance.

One of the chief roles of the Design Office is improving the accessibility and inclusion of government services. After a bit of research and a bit of code, we have successfully shown how Google can be used to translate a static webpage into the six most commonly spoken languages in Chicago. This demo was developed to test the viability of computer translation, specifically neural machine translation services (NMTS) we’ve chosen to use Google Translate because it was the only out-of-the-box translation service to support Tagalog. The City of Chicago is exploring different strategies for web translation of City content.

Google translate tagalog into english