Graiffiti - Art of language translations without data leaks

About Me

I'm Dhiraj Shekar. By the time of this writing, I've been working in Finance and Banking for over 15 years in the Quantitative Finance field in various areas, Equity quant finance, Equity and Credit Derivatives research, etc. building various types of trading and quant research models in the different banks that I have worked in over the years. All through my career I've had the passion for automation, problem solving, new research ideas, etc. I moved to Denmark some years ago, and working in a multi-lingual organization without Danish language skills in the initial years, I realized reading documents and emails in multiple languages such as the different nordic languages was a problem, not only for me but quite commonly prevalent in this part of the world, and there was an apparent and a regular need for using translation services. 

Putting the onus of checking the document/text for sensitive information before translating it using a 3rd party translation service on the hands of the employee/user does not effectively mitigate this risk for a purely logical reason, i.e., How would the employee/user know there is sensitive information in a text which they need to translate in the first place to understand?

Secondly, as an Engineer myself, I strongly believe, as Murphy rightly put it, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (one day or another)." and generally incline towards solving such problems.

I also find it amusing to think about solutions for common problems! And, thus was the birth of the first version of a solution to this ubiquitous problem, which eventually led to the creation of Graiffiti.com. Read more about it below and check it out hands-on in the Home page.

About GRAIFFITI

Graiffiti.com website was launched in the year 2023. It is an elegant and effective solution to a commonly prevalent operational risk issue within all multi-lingual organizations. It prevents inadvertent data leaks that may occur while using 3rd party language translation engines.

Let's assume a hypothetical scenario where this statement is found in an internal article within an organization, "Deutsche Bank richtet Vorstand neu aus, um Umsetzung ihrer Strategie weiter zu beschleunigen". An employee who couldn't read German might want to translate it. And they wouldn't even know if it has sensitive information because its in German. And in case this statement does contain any information that is sensitive to the organization, then using a 3rd party translation engine such as Google Translate would be a source of data leak. In an organization with 1000s of employees and 1000s of documents/emails/news articles, etc. in different languages the scale of this data leak could potentially be mind blowing. Whereas, using a service such as Graiffiti.com hosted within the organization would facilitate a secure translation without the risk of any sensitive information leaving outside the organization.

Graiffiti.com is a great solution for translating documents or any text that may contain sensitive information. Customer information, new research ideas, drug related documents, clinical trial documentations from different countries in pharmaceutical companies, contracts, vendor agreements, information classified as Confidential or Private are all strong use cases of Graiffiti.com.

Graiffiti.com hosted here is a prototype solution to this language translation problem. Implementing a full-fledged solution will require customization for the organization.