Harmonizing Languages: A Hybrid Translation Architecture for Multilingual Interfaces in the Layamritam App

As digital literacy expands across diverse demographics, encompassing varying ages, education levels, regions, and languages, the necessity for multilingual user interfaces becomes increasingly crucial, particularly beyond the conventional English interface. Studies have demonstrated that interfaces supporting multiple languages significantly enhance adoption among rural and older populations. Developing such interfaces entails careful consideration of several factors, including the choice between established translation APIs versus manual translations, server-side versus client-side translation processes, and the nuances of translation versus transliteration for both static and dynamic content. Various design approaches exist for crafting multilingual interfaces, from leveraging popular third-party APIs on the client side to managing a manually populated translation database on the server side. This paper introduces a novel hybrid translation architecture that synergizes third-party APIs with a server-side database. This integration facilitates rapid translation implementations with options for manual overrides. Our server-side database approach offers cost-effective, high-performance translations, while the client-side database supports offline translation capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework through its application in the Layamritam app, a platform offering streaming music complete with multilingual lyrics.