The problem
Nearly 1 in 3 British Columbians has a mother tongue that is neither English nor French. In Richmond, 45% of residents have a Chinese language as their mother tongue. People’s Law School publishes about 1,000 pages of plain-language legal information, but only in English. Translating a site that size professionally, and keeping it current as lawyers revise pages, was far beyond a non-profit’s budget.
The challenge
Legal translation is unforgiving. A mistranslated term like “licensed insolvency trustee” or “representation agreement” can send a reader to the wrong office or the wrong form. Tangowork also had to prove the translations were right without being able to read them. We can follow French well enough, but nobody on staff is a native speaker of the languages we were translating into, including Chinese.
A People’s Law School guide in Simplified Chinese. All 1,017 public pages are available in French and Chinese, and each one tells readers that AI translated it and how to report a mistake.
The solution
Tangowork built a translation pipeline that lives inside People’s Law School’s publishing workflow. When an editor publishes an English page in Contentful, the pipeline sends it to OpenAI GPT-5.6 Terra along with a glossary of 339 legal terms. The French and Chinese pages are live within seconds. The glossary was the decision that mattered most: it keeps terms like “desk-order divorce” and “alternative dispute resolution” consistent on every page, in every language. To check the work, a second model, Anthropic Claude, translates each page back into English. We then score how closely the round trip matches the original.
Back-translation magnifies errors, so a round trip that still reads true is strong evidence. A score of 100 would mean the English came back word for word. Costs are estimates at September 2026 list prices.
The results
- 100% of the site in French and Simplified Chinese, kept current. An edit to an English page is live in both languages within seconds, and the Beagle+ chatbot answers in the language of the page. As far as we know, no other public legal information site in Canada does this.
- Rated acceptable or strong for legal accuracy, terminology, and linguistic quality on every page reviewed by legal translators at Éducaloi (French) and MOSAIC (Chinese).
- 1,000 French readers a month, up from 0 when French launched in April 2026. Simplified Chinese launched on September 4, 2026.
- About 6 cents a page to translate and check a typical guide page in one language. The whole site costs under $100 per language.