Content originally written in English describing a variety of location based information changes over time in both English and in a number of languages that the content has been translated in.

Typically translation costs are calculated per word. Translators can’t easily tell what has changed in an article over time and charge the full article word count to translate the piece even if only a small piece has changed. At scale this simply is ineffective and the wrong thing to do.

There was a desire to calculate what should be translated and provide tools to both editorial and production staff to be able to budget and manage the workflow of translations. These tools would need to work across language boundaries and guide the translation process for the various stakeholders and translators.

We built a Drupal based solution that tracks versions of Articles and calculates the differences between versions in several languages. The editorial owners of the content can send new versions of articles for translation in particular languages and the system automatically picks the least booked translator that supports the language that the article is being translated into. It also lets the translator know how many words have been changed.

This slashes translation costs hugely as the system knows what needs translation and the translators only retranslated the relevant areas of the articles.