14 Languages in Days, Not Quarters Sitewide AI Translation for CCRTA's Title VI Mandate

Customer

The Corpus Christi Regional Transportation Authority (CCRTA) serves a ridership where language access isn't a nice-to-have; it's a federal civil-rights obligation. Under Title VI, transit agencies must provide meaningful access to services for riders with limited English proficiency, and an upcoming compliance audit put a date on it.

Challenge

Every Conventional Option Failed a Different Test

Enterprise localization platforms (translation proxies and managed services) carry recurring per-language, per-pageview fees, insert a third party into the serving path of every request, and would have taken longer to procure than the audit window allowed.

Professional human translation is priced per word. Across a site of this size (roughly 8,000 unique strings), multiplied by every language and re-purchased every time content changes, the numbers stop making sense for a public agency.

The free Google Translate widget is effectively deprecated, degrades page performance, and, fatally for a transit site, mangles the proper nouns riders depend on. A stop named "Staples & Gollihar" must never come back as something else.

And the audit had a requirement no widget could meet: equivalent access to the content of PDF route maps and schedules, documents that exist only in English.

Solution

Translation as a Rendering Layer, Not a Content Program

Because the site was already server-rendered on SvelteKit, translation could be built as a rendering layer rather than a content-management program. Every page is translated on the server before it reaches the rider: translated pages live at real URLs (ccrta.org/es/…), riders' language preferences follow them across visits, and search engines still see canonical English.

Translation itself is done by an LLM with a curated transit glossary. And, more importantly, with structural protection: stop names, route names, and headsigns are marked untranslatable at the template level, so the data riders navigate by is never touched. Each unique string is translated exactly once per language and cached; after the first render, pages serve from cache at full speed with zero per-request translation cost. When staff edit content in the CMS, the new text translates itself on the next render. There is no translation workflow, no vendor ticket, no stale version.

The system fails open: if any part of the translation pipeline is ever unavailable, riders get English, never an error.

Featured Requirement

Translated Route Maps and Schedules as Downloadable PDFs

The audit's hardest line item was access to translations of the PDF route maps: documents that are individually art-directed, printed months in advance, and exist only in English. Machine-editing those files was never realistic: no automated translation survives hand-drawn artwork and dense timetable tables.

Instead, every route now offers a downloadable translated schedule PDF in all fourteen languages, generated on the fly from the agency's own transit data: the full timetable keyed to numbered timepoints, the route drawn on a real map, standard rider information in the rider's language, and a scannable QR code that hands off to the live route page for real-time bus positions and service alerts. Because each document is generated rather than stored, it is dated, always current with the published schedule (something the pre-printed English brochures cannot be), and cached at three layers so downloads are instant. Prose documents get an automatic "read translated version" view; the English originals remain the authoritative record.

Quality, Continuously Verified

Machine translation without monitoring is a liability. An automated smoke test probes sampled pages in all fourteen languages every six hours (checking for untranslated leakage, verifying routing behavior, and confirming search engines are handled correctly) with failures reported to the same monitoring stack as the rest of the site.

Results

The Whole Site, Fourteen Languages, Days Not Quarters

• Fourteen languages (Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, and Thai) across every page of the site.
• One-time translation compute of a few dollars per language for the entire site, versus recurring five-figure annual platform fees.
• Prototype to production in days, inside the audit window.
• New and edited content translates itself: no ongoing localization workflow.
• Downloadable translated schedule PDFs for every route in all fourteen languages: generated on demand from live transit data, always current, with a QR hand-off to the live route page.
• No consent banner required: the only cookie involved is the rider's own language preference.