How to make the most of translation management systems
Translation Management Systems are the programs that support translation tasks and bring teams of multiple people and functions together, even if these teams happen to be located in different countries.
These type of software automates all repeatable and non-essential work that can be done by systems, as well as many parts of the human language translation process. This way, only the creative work of translation is left for the human component, which maximizes translator efficiency.
A TMS often connects to a Content Management System to manage foreign content. In this case, it addresses different categories in different degrees:
- Business Management, which includes Project Management, Resource management, Financial management and even related to Enterprise Resource Planning tools.
- Process management, a category that constitutes the domain of specialized project management tools and includes workflow, collaboration, content connectors.
- Language management, traditionally performed with specialized translation tools. It has integrated translation memory, webtop translation tools, markup and customer review.
The mission is to help companies make a difference on a global scale by vanishing the language barriers. The idea is to easily scale every translation or localization efforts with different features including:
- Translation memory management
One of the most important features a TMS has is translation memory, a database of previously translated phrases and fragments. The main goal of such memories is to maintain consistency by providing translators reference to material that has been previously translated.
- Workflow Management
As the name suggests, it is about the different processes and seeks to automate them while facilitating communication between the team members to speed things up and help reduce costs. It can also be known as process management. A TMS can grab new content automatically and assign it to translators from a content management system that regularly publishes to a website or similar. This way, the multilingual audience can stay up to date.
- Terminology Management
It counts with databases that keep a record of translated terms and branding. Terminology databases are vital to ensure consistency in branding across languages and regions.
- Integrated Machine Translation
There are numerous API connectors for popular machine translation providers and they work just fine with certain number of characters. It is obvious that machine translation is not as good as human translation. Nonetheless, having the ability to add machine translation to the workflow when needed is beneficial for reducing costs and time.
In synthesis, Translation Management Systems are software created to support translation and localization processes, automating some of the procedures to save time and focus on tasks that require better analysis.
The systems have made it easier to work on multiple projects at the same time and have benefited not only agencies, but also freelance translators
