Astoria Software and Translations.com Announce XML “Translation-Enabled Content Management” Initiative | damTRENDS.

Global 2000 firms face enormous challenges in creating content for distribution to other locales throughout the world. These challenges can be enumerated as follows:

• Translation of content is perceived as a separate function from the creation and management of product documentation. Therefore, firms must engage in two separate buying cycles to build an end-to-end solution for producing localized content.
• Linking a content management system and a translation management system typically means that firms must spend extra money to create a specialized, “one-off” integration that requires significant investment of IT resources both for the initial integration and for ongoing maintenance of the integration.
• The Language Service Provider (LSP) market is highly fragmented, yet some vendors try to lock customers into a “closed” system where only the vendor’s management tools and translation resources are available, thereby forcing customers to discard trusted localization providers who are not part of the vendor’s network.

The Translation-Enabled Content Management initiative addresses the root causes of these problems. Its fundamental principles are:

• There should be an end-to-end solution for the creation, management, localization, and production of product documentation.
• Customers should be allowed to tie together the services of existing and trusted vendors of either content management or translation management without being forced into a closed system defined by any single vendor.
• The rise of SOA and Software-as-a-Service gives customers a real avenue for building end-to-end solutions that are simple to integrate, conform to IT governance policies, and are delivered by best-of-breed service providers.

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