Part 2: Unified Tech and Content Powers Omnimarket Success

We started this blog series by discussing how intelligent translation can enable the success of your omnimarket strategy. This second entry of our six-part series focuses on one of the five aspects of intelligent translation, being Tech Connected.

Disconnects can kill your global content program and translation strategy. Whether it’s poor communication, manual workflows or missed deadlines, these kinds of pitfalls will ultimately impact localization cost, quality and delivery.

Inefficient and antiquated technology is another major disconnect that can have a big impact. A recent Forrester report revealed that nearly 80% of organizations had not integrated their translation management systems with their content management systems, proving that there’s a lot of work still to be done.

The endless development loop

Incompatible technology solutions introduce several other issues into the localization workflow. A small, seemingly easy task like updating availability in translation management systems, which may need to be done several times a day, can take a linguist 30 minutes. A lack of shared protocols between content management systems (CMS) and translation management systems (TMS) further exacerbates to the problem. To solve the immediate need, customers or language vendors may develop their own connector. Later, as systems are upgraded, there is a risk the connector will not be compatible, so more development is needed. Without realizing it, an endless development loop has been created. There is some hope: To minimize this kind of re-work, Common Sense Advisory recommends that a dedicated solution like the one created by Xillio might be an answer.

Faced with these obstacles, what can be done? Translation management solutions are most beneficial when content is easily accessible. To be successful, organizations must integrate and form a network connecting all content repositories.

Working in preferred existing systems and automatically submitting content for translation rather than manually moving files back and forth, optimizes quality, time to market and user experience. To expedite set up and deployment, TMS solutions with standard out-of-the-box connectors, minimal configuration requirements and options for custom connectors allow the most flexibility and compatibility with existing content systems.

Often less than half of what buyers spend actually goes to language-oriented tasks. Although some overhead is necessary, much of it arises when parties deal with a variety of incompatible systems, according to CSA’s Research Analysis.

Many current integrations and connectors are manual and queued only when a human moves files, which then initiates the translation process. Translation can also be triggered by an event. For example, when a step is completed, such as approving content, the content will be automatically submitted to the TMS for translation. Before long Linguistic AI will make connectors smarter by continuously monitoring repository content in the background. The Linguistic AI then optimizes the process by automatically deciding when to start translation based on deadlines and resource availability.

Save time and resources with intelligent translation