Polyglot

Problem

Not everyone understands English

Singapore's commitment to its four official languages - English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil - reflects our multicultural identity. However, a significant gap exists in digital government services, where most websites are available only in English.

While English serves as our working language, there are citizens, especially seniors, who are more comfortable in their mother tongue. This language barrier can create real challenges when they need to access essential government information or services online. When citizens cannot fully understand government communications, it may lead to misunderstandings, reduced participation in government initiatives, or dependence on family members for translation.

(Source: SingStat - Census of Population 2020 Statistical Release 1, page 24)

Translations are tricky and expensive

Traditional translation is a human-intensive process requiring skilled professionals for each language pair. This makes it both expensive and time-consuming to translate the vast amount of content across hundreds of government websites and digital services. As a result, maintaining multilingual versions of government websites becomes impractical at scale, creating a significant barrier to making government services truly accessible to all Singaporeans in their preferred language.

Objectives and product goals

Translations available for all, on every possible digital touchpoint

We envision a future where all Singapore Government websites and digital services are available in all our official languages, regardless of the platform they are hosted on.

Research and approach

1. Understanding citizen expectations of translated content

The Singapore Government has been criticised for substandard translation quality. We need to understand the factors that affect acceptance of translated content.

(Source: The Straits Times: From Bras Basah to 'Bust' Basah: Notable translation gaffes in S'pore)

2. Understanding Government agency processes

Each and every Singapore Government agency respectively owns the content that they publish, inclusive of any translated content. We need to understand existing processes to see how and what affects an agency's capability to produce translated content.

Solution

We propose a two-part solution:

1. Platform-agnostic widget (to be installed on any Singapore Government website)

2. A Large-language Model (LLM)-powered translation engine in the back-end that can automatically translate Singapore Government websites should a human-verified translation not exist

   1. The engine would be trained to ensure certain translations follow local terms (e.g. pemerintah to refer to the Government in Malay, as opposed to kerajaan, as the latter refers to a monarchy-based Government which Singapore isn't).

Outcomes and impact

We were able to translate an existing website into Malay, Mandarin and Tamil whilst maintaining the intent of the content that was initially written in English.

Next steps and future vision

Short-term

As at the time publishing, we are in the midst of working with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI)'s to study the existing translation ecosystem - policy, Government agency processes and citizen behaviours, so that we have a comprehensive understanding of how we can roll out the product at scale.

Mid-term

We intend to run small-scale trials to test out hypothesis that would have been synthesised as part of our study (as pointed out in our Short-term)

Long-term

Within Singapore, we hope to have the product running on Government websites.

Beyond Singapore, we would want to open-source the tool, to allow other countries or organisations to use the product to provide translations for their users.