LinguaSkin Case Study
How LinguaSkin cut Tribal’s multilingual development cost by more than 90%
Tribal provides expertise, software and services to public, private and other education institutions worldwide. Their customers range in size from organisations supporting 50 students on one site to those supporting 200,000 students across multiple sites.
Tribal’s systems make everyday tasks as quick and efficient as possible. They help their customers give students a rewarding learning experience that improves outcomes and ensures value every step of the way.
What Tribal needed to achieve
In 2021, Tribal was redeveloping its student and parent portal (SPP) for the British Council, who needed a version they could use in 30 languages across 50 countries.
To support this, the SPP needed a robust multilingual capability.
Key challenges
Tribal needed language technology that would provide multilingual capability with translations that could be edited to work in context for different countries and cultures. The technology would also need to include a language selector so people could interact with the British Council’s SPP in the language of their choice.
Although Tribal have the in-house expertise to develop this capability, it would take them a significant amount of time and be expensive to complete.
To avoid the hassle, cost and risk of an in-house development, they could:
- Suggest the British Council use a machine translation plug-in. However, this would reduce the quality of the translations and not allow the British Council to edit them. Machine translation plug-ins also compromise reliability and security and raise data protection concerns.
- Partner with a specialist provider of language technology.
Why Tribal chose LinguaSkin
Tribal needed a solution requiring minimal development investment, and that was:
- ✓ Compatible with its software
- ✓ Cost-effective
- ✓ Secure
- ✓ Quick and easy to implement
- ✓ Reliable
- ✓ Flexible
Tribal first worked with LinguaSkin in 2017, adding bilingual capability to its ebs system for its customers in Wales. In 2019, Tribal used LinguaSkin to add bilingual capability to the University of South Wales’ student information system. The success of this project led Tribal and LinguaSkin to establish a master services agreement (MSA) that made it easier for Tribal to engage LinguaSkin for future projects. Since then, LinguaSkin has been used by a number of customers for Tribal Maytas, EBS and SITS/eVision implementations.
For the British Council project, LinguaSkin:
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Meant Tribal could add multilingual capability at less than 10% of the estimated cost to develop the capability in-house
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Cut Tribal’s overall development costs by around 20%
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Could be implemented in parallel with Tribal’s ongoing development of the SPP, helping them meet project deadlines
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Reduced project risk by simplifying the system design and handing the translation requirements to a proven solution
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Allowed the British Council to easily add new languages and edit their translations.
In effect, LinguaSkin gave Tribal the freedom to develop a monolingual English system and leave the multilingual capability aspect entirely to LinguaSkin.
Implementation
LinguaSkin works with any third-party application, including cloud and SaaS-based systems. It’s hosted on a web server or cloud platform provided by the software supplier, customer or LinguaSkin. As it doesn’t need to integrate with the target application, it’s flexible and easy to set up.
LinguaSkin is installed as a ‘software proxy’ between the browser and the target application (in this case, the SPP), either remotely or on the same secure server as the target application. It requires no technical effort from the customer and no changes to the target application or its configuration.
For Tribal’s SPP, all the LinguaSkin team needed was browser access, in the same way as a normal user. All the British Council had to do was test and, if necessary, edit the translations before going live.
There was no interruption to service and the existing English language SPP is maintained and operates as normal.
This all makes implementation fast and risk-free. The whole process can be done in as little as a month.
How LinguaSkin works
LinguaSkin sits in the midde of web requests and responses between a site and a browser, replacing text with an alternate language. This is known as proxy localisation. It enhances web-based applications with no need to change them.
First, the English text is scraped and sent to a professional for translation. When complete, the translations are configured as replacement text and a language selector is added to the site. Finally, the customer tests the translations to make sure they’re correct and work in context.
It’s easy to add as many languages as you need. Unlike with automatic online translation technology, translations can be edited at any time and customised to fit with the customer’s style, terminology and dialect.
Users can switch between languages with just one click. Plus, switching languages doesn’t change page location or context. Therefore, no matter how many you add, the page structure and content are guaranteed not to change.
Support
LinguaSkin is supported by the LinguaSkin team. They react quickly to changes and upgrades and are always happy to work with Tribal on new developments.
When working with a partner like Tribal, the LinguaSkin team can provide support through the partner’s help desk or directly to the customer. Both reduce the partner’s hassle and overheads.
LinguaSkin made it so much easier for us to add multilingual capability to the British Council’s SPP. They saved us considerable development time and hassle and took away a huge amount of cost, risk and stress. Overall, they helped us deliver a great product on budget and on time.
Benefits
LinguaSkin are language technology specialists. Partnering with them meant Tribal could simplify the overall application architecture, design and project management, minimising its cost and effort and significantly mitigating the project’s risk.
LinguaSkin cost Tribal less than 10% of the estimated expense to develop multilingual capability in-house and reduced its overall project cost by around 20%.
LinguaSkin also meant Tribal could avoid the security issues and errors that machine translation technology can cause. It ensures quality as the text is translated by a professional and can be tested to make sure it’s accurate and in context.
Tribal can use LinguaSkin to enhance any of its products, giving it access to new markets and benefitting its existing customers.
LinguaSkin’s benefits at a glance
- ✓ Can be applied to any Tribal web-based product
- ✓ Mitigated project risk
- ✓ Cost less than 10% of expense to develop in-house
- ✓ Seamless integration with no change to the SPP software
- ✓ Fast to implement: can be up and running in as little as a month
- ✓ Adds multilingual capability with no loss of quality, control or security
- ✓ Gives Tribal access to new markets
- ✓ Translations can be customized for individual customers or situations
Key learning
The partnership between Tribal and LinguaSkin shows how software developers and vendors can use LinguaSkin to quickly add multilingual capability. LinguaSkin makes products more appealing, opens up access to new markets and cuts the time, cost and stress of new developments.
Going forward
LinguaSkin can be used for any web-based application, so has enormous potential to enhance any platform that would benefit from multilingual capability.
As communities worldwide continue to diversify, there can be few organisations that wouldn’t benefit from inviting people to interact with them in their native language.
What they said
We worked with LinguaSkin on several of our applications and were so impressed by both their product and service that we established an MSA with them. Working with the LinguaSkin team is always a pleasure. They’re experts at what they do, quick to respond and keen to partner with us on new developments. They helped us develop a first-class product for the British Council and made what could have been a challenging project much easier. Building on the success of this, we’re currently using LinguaSkin to add bilingual capability to a site in New Zealand so our client’s Māori students can interact with them in their native language.