One of the most important purchasing decisions you’ll need to make as you build out your localization and internationalization program is a translation management system (TMS). You can think of this as a Content Management System that is designed for translation. When set up correctly, a TMS enables you to automate most of your translation processes. This way source material is translated by default. Most companies start off with mostly manual translation processes. This works OK for small mobile apps in a few languages, but it doesn’t scale as your scope of coverage increases.
Most TMS platforms integrate with popular code repositories like Github and Bitbucket. The companies that offer TMS largely started out as app localization tools, so that’s largely taken care of.
If you plan to localize your company website (and in most cases you should), you’ll want to choose a TMS that has a robust integration with your CMS. If you have not already chosen a CMS, this is a good time to do so. The switching cost for both of these platforms is high, so it is important to get that right early on.
It is important that your CMS supports multi-lingual operation. Word Press, for example, can only do this using third party plug-ins. Other CMS platforms like Drupal and Contentful are natively multilingual.
Things you will want to look for in the TMS ←→ CMS integration include:
As a general rule, higher end TMS platforms like Smartling, Phrase and Lilt have better CMS integrations. Low cost platforms tend to have cruder integrations or do not provide them at all. TMS platforms are a niche product and it costs money to maintain these integrations. The right way to view TMS pricing is to compare it to the engineering time and cost to build and maintain integrations. In most cases, the TMS wins compared to having scarce engineers work on bespoke tooling.
See also Choosing The Right Content Management System (CMS)
<aside> 👉 You’ll also need to go through a similar evaluation for your Help Center if it will live different CMS like Zendesk.
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You are probably going to want to use AI (machine translation) as part of your translation process. Mature TMS platforms enable you to set up a variety of workflows from fully automated machine translation to extensively reviewed human translation. For example, you might route your Help Center backlog to an MTPE (machine translation + post-edit) workflow, while marketing assets are routed to human translators and copy editors.
The TMS can also take some of the guesswork out of which machine translation service to use. There are dozens of options available now, and certain systems tend to do better for some languages and not others. Smartling, for example, scores MT engines by how much post-editing is required, and routes translation requests to the MT engines that score best on this metric.
A good TMS platform will enable you to use whatever combination of language service providers, freelancers and in house employees you want to. In fact, that is one of the most important functions, because it is often the case that a vendor that is good with one set of languages will struggle with others. Flexibility in work assignments is key.
<aside> 🚫 Be wary of a translation or TMS provider that locks you into using their translation services. There are a few agencies that do this. It almost always results in a bad customer experience. It’s fine if they offer language services as an option, but allow you to bring your own translation agencies.
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