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SWANSEA Council has revealed that it has leveraged translators for 34 different languages in the last year. The council said that it required innovative chat translation solutions to help communicate with Polish, Bengali, Turkish and Vietnamese native speakers for a range of services such as social services, housing and education.

Taha Idris, chairman of Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council (SBREC), said that people should be proud of the linguist and ethnic diversity in the country in a press release. However, he also called for more resources for people who want to learn to speak English.

Sylheti is the number one language that the Swansea Council needed help with translating. Spoken in parts of northern Bangladesh and India, the language accounted for 124 of the chat translation requests.Polish was second, followed by Bengali and then Algerian. And, according to reports, there were also 14 requests for British Sign Language translation, along with one each for languages including Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Korean and Welsh.

Increasingly, there is a growing demand for chat translation solutions as clients as well as employees have become extremely diverse and speak in multiple different languages. The number of requests for chat translation in Swansea has increased dramatically in recent years and a Swansea Council spokesman commented the chat translation figures reflected the growing diversity of the area.

Prior to implementing chat translation, different departments in Swansea Council were required to figure out these translations on their own.

Furthermore, social media has begun to be seamlessly integrated with chat translation platforms. TMCnet reported that a recent blog post from Lionbridge, a provider of the chat translation platform GeoFluent spoke about how last year at the Mobile World Conference, a new tool was unveiled called the Twitter (News - Alert) Translation Center which assists volunteers in translating chats into multiple languages. Facebook not to be left behind also implemented a system around this time that allowed volunteers to utilize its service in several languages all over the globe.