Translation management system

A translation management system, or TMS, is software that runs the work of translating: it takes in content, sends it to the people or machines that translate it, applies the company's earlier translations and approved terms, tracks review and approval, and hands the finished translations back. Wikipedia describes it as software for automating much of the human translation process while leaving the creative work of translating and reviewing to people.

What a TMS does#

Wikipedia splits a TMS into two kinds of technology. The process side watches source content for changes, extracts what needs translating, and routes it through a workflow of translators and reviewers who may work in different places. The linguistic side holds a translation memory, a terminology database and often machine translation, so that each new job starts from what was already translated and decided.

Around those sit the features a localization team uses every day: workflows that can be set up per project, task tracking, review and approval steps, and reports on progress and cost. Older names for the same kind of product are globalization management system and global content management system.

A TMS is a step up from a CAT tool, the computer-assisted translation tool a single translator works in. The CAT tool supports one translator at their own work; the TMS adds the workflow and project management around many translators and languages.

LangRelay is not a TMS#

LangRelay is a website translation tool. It reads the pages of your website as visitors see them, translates their text with machine translation, runs free checks that hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price, and then serves each approved translation on your site at its own address, with hreflang and a language switcher. Its WordPress plugin does the serving, and a script tag covers other sites.

It does not do the jobs that define a TMS. It does not take in files from your app, your help center or your print material, does not route jobs to translation vendors or track what they cost, and does not keep a translation memory with fuzzy matches or exchange memories as TMX files. Its reuse is exact: identical text on your site shares one translation. If your translation work spans an app, documentation and marketing in many formats, you need a TMS, and LangRelay is not a substitute.

A worked example#

This is a worked example. A software company ships an app in six languages and runs a WordPress marketing site. Its app's strings, help articles and release notes already go through a TMS, where its translators and its agency work. The marketing site is where that setup strains: every new landing page means exporting content, sending it out, and pasting the translations back into WordPress copies of the page. Here the two tools split the work. The TMS keeps the app and the documents, and LangRelay translates the website from its rendered pages, with the company's own reviewers approving each page under Ask me first and the glossary (paid plans) keeping product names the same as in the app.

Translation memory covers how a TMS reuses earlier work, and string translation covers the strings themes and plugins print. For tools built for websites, see the website translation software comparison.