New Online Tools Move Translation into the Cloud

Article Details

Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Benjamin B. Sargent on March 1, 2010 in the following blogs: Business Globalization, Technology, Translation and Localization, Best Practices
Pages \| \|

While established players Lingotek, Lionbridge, Sajan, SDL, and Welocalize continue to make noise about crowd-in-the-cloud translation management, upstart entrepreneurs are jumping into the fray with innovative technologies modeling new approaches to crowd and cloud-based translation systems. Most are web-resident applications (metaphorically "in the cloud") but several go further, deploying literally in cloud-computing architectures such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

In a Quick Take published last week,"The New Vortex around TMS-in-the-Cloud," we describe new contenders in translation and language management for two types of systems:

From Europe, three new translation management systems (TMS): TakeItInt (Sweden), WebWordSystem (Denmark), and Wordbee (Luxembourg). TakeItInt is scheduled to enter beta testing in March 2010. Meanwhile, WebWordSystem and Wordbee are already operating.

From the U.S., new options for multilingual web management: both NativeTung and Smartling aim to simplify converting a monolingual site into a multilingual one, whether it’s social networking, marketing, e-commerce, or all of the above. Further out the food chain, both Langoling and WordMonkey promise easy translation for consumers and social communicators.

Innovation isn't only coming from the commercial sector. LSP stalwarts are also bringing new technology to their service delivery and customer relationships: Globalization Partners International with its customer portal, LanguageWire with its online translation environment AGITO, and SquidgeIT. SquidgeIT is currently an in-house system at Applied Language Solutions in the U.K. (talkbase.net), but is scheduled for general release as a multi-tenant web-based application in summer 2010.

These new entrants promise to bring of easy-to-use tools to the entire spectrum of web users, from professional translators to information publishers to social networking consumers. More choice in tools will increase the transparency of language in the online world.

Categories