Making local sermons global: Adding a new language to the site - Technical considerations

The website was designed from the ground up with multilingualism at its core. We strive to ensure that visitors who access the site in a particular language see no English word snippets like "error message". Adding a new language involves four primary requirements:

• 1. Our archive comprises over 2000 sermons and devotionals, totaling about 40 million characters. To translate all these documents, we use a translator API that charges around $20 for every 1 million characters translated. Therefore, the cost of translating our archive for a new language is approximately $800.
• 2. Each language requires at least one Bible paired with it. We need a partner to provide us with the license for the new Bible in that particular language. Currently, we use the Nueva Biblia Latinoamericana for Spanish and the King James Bible for English.
• 3. Every day, we send out two Bible verses paired with a devotional from our archive (God Speaks Today). We have integrated our website with an email service provider and would start an additional email list in the newly added language. We would expect our partner to look for ways to increase the email list, even though the monthly cost depends on the overall size of the contact list.
• 4. We use a vector embedding technique to search our archive, and adding a new language requires around 200,000 new vector entries. While these vectors are generated automatically, adding a new language may increase the monthly cost we have to pay our providers to host the vector database, archive database, and web server. However, we estimate that the monthly cost increase should not exceed $50 - $100.

For more information, please write to Ernst Diehl: diehl[at]alum.mit.edu