6 Ways to Save Money and Time on Translations with a Translation Management System

AuthorXTM Content Team

Reading time 5 minutes

Is your need for global content growing but you’re struggling with rising costs and long translation times? If this scenario sounds familiar, there are many changes you can make to your translation process to improve efficiency, from using machine translation to applying new translation technologies. But how? Quite simple. Start using a translation management system (TMS) to manage your whole translation process.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of a TMS, you might be asking yourself “What is a translation management system?” A TMS is software that you can use to streamline translation processes to make them more efficient, resulting in cost savings and reduced time to produce translations. A TMS automates many manual processes, such as saving files and storing project communication. And it can support all kinds of content types, from software strings to support files to video files.

In this blog, we’ll look at six ways that a TMS can help you save money and time on translation projects.

#1 Centralize Translation Assets

Having different language assets for each separate team of linguists can cause many inefficiencies, including duplicated translated content, multiple translation memories, and no standardization. However, a TMS can centralize all translation and language assets, allowing users to leverage the same assets at all times, which drives up consistency in brand tone and voice.

#2 Automate the Translation Process

Any translation process has numerous steps, from processing files to translating words to verifying the design. With a translation management system, you can automate the majority of these processes for extra efficiency in your program. For example, you can automate workflows so that when one linguist completes their step, the translation automatically moves to the next step of the workflow, and the user responsible for it is notified via email. This removes the need for manual notifications, which is particularly efficient if linguists are located in different time zones.

#3 Customize Translation Worfklows

A TMS has the flexibility to create infinite translation workflows based on your needs and requirements. Because not all languages will have the same required number of workflow steps (some of them may require additional steps for legal or design review, for example), a TMS lets you set up as many workflow steps as you like for every project. This customization means that there is no need to send emails, attach or store files, and manually set up review cycles outside of the localization ecosystem, keeping all activity within the TMS. Thanks to this, the time needed to complete the project is reduced considerably, saving money in the process.

#4 Incorporate the Benefits of Machine Translation

Machine translation (MT) provides many benefits, especially speedy translations and lower costs. When translation quality isn’t as important as speed, you can use your MT engine of choice in the TMS, obtaining high-quality output that requires minimal or no post-editing by linguists. Furthermore, neural machine translation (NMT) now provides more human-like MT content than ever before, driving up cost-efficiency and allowing you to scale up without costs spiraling upward.

#5 Leverage AI Technologies in the Translation Process

AI continues to make advancements in the language translation space, allowing companies to produce more translated content with better quality in less time. With a TMS, you can leverage these AI technologies and apply them to your localization processes for increased efficiency. For example, a TMS can include features such as speech recognition that can produce transcriptions in mere seconds; inter-line vector space (ILVS) and TM aligner tools mean that processes that were previously very time-consuming, such as inserting tags or building TMs from scratch respectively, can now be completed in just seconds; and new large language models like GPT mean that machine-translated content in a TMS is now more human-like than ever before. All of this results in much higher quality output and, consequently, increased customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

#6 Connect to Existing Content Tools

Using a TMS doesn’t mean you change your existing content-creation processes—you can connect them to a TMS. By connecting your authoring tool to the TMS via a connector, you can manage your whole localization process directly from the former. Simply select the content you want for translation, select the languages you want to translate it into and send it for translation to the TMS. Once completed, the translations will be imported directly back into your original tool, ready for publication. The removal of all manual tasks is the biggest difference-maker in terms of cost-efficiency.

Automated workflows, centralization of language assets, and seamless connectivity with other software platforms enable the creation of a localization ecosystem where everyone can work on, which is what makes a localization program cost-efficient. Only a TMS can centralize all these features, which is why there cannot be a cost-efficient localization program without a translation management system.