Hi,
I replied to your email, twice. It seems our emails went in your spam.
We don't have discounts.
However, here is a tip:
You should be able to achieve a multilingual setup without HikaShop Essential. With the Essential you'll get translation popups everywhere so that you can just enter your translations and the system will take care of saving them for you.
But in fact you can manually create translation overrides under the Languages tab of the HikaShop configuration and enter the translation keys in your content instead of the texts and they will automatically use the overrides. The translation interface would only simplify that work as it saves your texts in the language overrides for you.
That way, you can start with the Starter edition and invest in the Essential edition in the future when you get more funds.