Every industry has their own acronym salad. Localization is no exception. Those complicated terms are extremely important for 3 reasons:
- So everyone can understand each other without using that many words.
- To make a PPT and look intelligent.
- No, that’s really two reasons. Also number one is rather optional.
So, let’s see how to beat the PPT game in localization:
We’ve got:
- TMS (Translation Management System)
- CMS (Content Management System)
- CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation software)
If you’ve been explained several times what are these, but never can seem to remember exactly which is what and which does what afterward… no worries.
It’s normal because:
1. They’re not mutually exclusive.
2. They’re often merged together and confused with one another. So, sometimes, you’re talking about one product, but it might mean any or all of the three at the same time.
3. Some of the breakdowns, especially those on top of search engines, found on the Internet happen to be completely misleading and convoluted, and count on me to show you some of these below. The game starts at the bottom of the article.
4. They don’t sound cool, except for CAT, because we can make done-to-death puns.
So don’t worry. You’re covered.
CMS – Content Management System
Let’s start with the CMS. It’s the Content Management System.
That’s where you manage your content. I know, crazy.
More seriously, this is the place where a content creator uploads or somehow puts his content, for review, classification, reuse, centralization, or anything you might want or need. That’s a very broad definition.
The very famous blogging platform Wordpress classifies as a CMS. It’s a place where you can push you content, either articles, videos, or images, and then release it for the public to see. Wordpress is a CMS, that’s intended for blogging. But CMS can be much more than that.
Drupal, Joomla all qualify as CMS. But they’re intended for general website construction and not necessarily blogging. The gaming platform Steam also has an exhaustive CMS.
Keep in mind, CMS means Content Management System. That’s a very broad definition. Under this definition, all CMS may not all be intended for the public to see. Companies may be using their own internal CMS to handle their employees contents (daily communication, reports, etc).
What a CMS should do, how big it is, depends mostly on the user and their objectives.
And that’s where the problems begin: the definition is so broad, technically, even a smartphone or a laptop or even a SSD be called a CMS.
Obviously, that’s ridiculous, that’s why what we usually refer to as CMS are platforms, destined to either be shared or to be used by a team.
TMS – Translation Management System
Oops, wrong TMS, pic unrelated sorry
Here goes more trouble. 🤦 What if we have a CMS, but we need it to be multilingual.
If we’re managing content, seems like we’ll need some way to also manage the translation of this content. Again, we’ll assume that a team is working, or expected to work, on these translations, or at least that we’re working on several projects at a time. Otherwise, we can just save some backups on a computer.
In its most basic form, a TMS is a way of accessing and handling the same content in different languages.
So, what does this system look like, what does it do and what’s its relation a CMS? Here again, we need first to define what is “handling” and what englobes our “content‘.
Therefore, the answer is: that depends on the user, the service, and the scope.
A TMS can be a simple repository of translations, or can be a whole platform proposing access to internal/external users, translators, proofreaders. It can be self-hosted and maintained, or entrusted to a third party, such as Memsource.
One thing is sure, a TMS must be related in some sort of way to some sort of content, in other words, a TMS is generally expected to be attached to a CMS (see, we’re getting to use two of these terms in the same sentence🫡). But not always. （🙄）
Imagine you are a broke game publisher.
For some reason, you’re managing the localization of a bunch of different games. You’re going to want to store your localization data (meaning, what’s been translated inside your games), in a centralized place so everyone on your team or your outsourcers can access it quickly. Maybe you’ll also going to store your marketing material.
In this case, you’re going to have a TMS without necessarily a CMS.
The functionalities of a TMS can vary widely:
- Do you need this platform to save your translations, do you need it to notify your language specialists?
- Do you need your reviewers to push your final content live?
- Do you need it to send notification e-mails?
- Do you need advanced project management and custom endpoint API calls?
You may feel that the question is yes all the time.
Having to deal with systems overscaled systems, where half the functionalities won’t ever be used by anybody, a clogged UI, and overall clumsy bloatware where one needs to click through half a dozen things before reaching anything useful makes for an awful experience.
CMS and TMS are technical projects, and just like any project, it is best to find the right scope for the CMS or TMS you will be using. Going for a complex and comprehensive TMS system may lead to useless bloat. Going for too much simplicity or shortcuts may lead to issues with scoping up later-on.
These are questions whose answers will have to depend on the specific cases.
CAT (Computer Assisted Translation)
Last but not least. The Computer Assisted Translation Software. That’s a piece of software that’s here to help people in doing the actual translation. So right away, here’s the difference:
CMS and TMS manage.
The CAT creates.
It’s like the MS Word but for translation. It helps by providing a set of useful tools to translators. For example by reminding them of the glossary to use, or a list of previous translations from elsewhere in the project so they can know what style to follow.
By default, a CAT does not necessarily synchronize with what a team is doing, nor does it necessarily organize the proofreading review process. OmegaT, for example, does not provide tools to do anything beyond translation.
However, wouldn’t it be nice if they did? That would be the next logical step in having solid CAT tools. That is why most of them actually do it nowadays.
And that is why the line is so blurred between CAT and TMS.
Good CATs will have some TMS capabilities, or at least the capacity to connect to such systems (and actually this is the best scenario, by far). Good TMS will have some CAT capabilities, enabling quick search and edition, or even some QA functions. Nowadays, some of these are completely merged together and offer platforms with backends for both Translation Service Providers (or, as your grandmother would call them, translators) and content owners.
Now, personally, I think these SaaS CAT TMS aren’t the best way to do things, but that’s a completely different conversation.
To summarize:
- CMS: That place where you put stuff
- TMS: That place where you put the translation of stuff
- CAT: That thing to translate the stuff
If you still think this is hard to decipher, remember this: these acronyms are merely terms put on concepts. These concepts are very fluid and can evolve and change with time.
Now for the good bit. We mentioned a lot of the information found on the internet about these can be misleading or uselessly complicated, whether to fit a sales pitch or for whatever reason.
The Game
So how aboooooout… we play a game where we spot some of these misleading or incomplete information using all the information above.
The Rules: Watch the pics below, and spot the BS.
Answer: What’s going wrong here? Not that much actually, but if you’ve been following,
you’re just as confused as me as to why the process of translating a bunch of documents
needs to be represented with a geared cloud labeled “TMS”.
Answer: Mh, why does the TMS need to be a circular thing now? Also… WAIT WHAT?
At what point does “Fully Automatic Translation” is part of the “Main features” of a TMS? 🤷♂️
Answer:
Yeah I get that they needed 3 things to make the big thing do the thing.
Here’s the problem: TMS IS THE MANAGEMENT TOOL, maybe you mean CMS.
Also “automation tools” ARE the TRANSLATION TOOLS. FFS now.
Answer：Hey, there’s actually nothing too bad here, the representation is rather… it’s something.
Although, usually you drink the coffee cups separately so at what point does it matter if they are on the same rack? Oh IDK let’s be lenient on this one.
Also Smartcat, I’ll give you ten reasons NOT to put any of that stuff in a browser like you do but I’ll deal with that another time.
See, we made our own chart, everything clear now?
These are only a few select examples and these are not only not contributing to anybody’s understanding of the main tools around localization, but they’re actually hurting good practices and sound knowledge.
With all this being said, the two main takeaways of these articles are:
- CMS, TMS and CAT are useful tools that you may choose to use or not, but they aren’t some complicated Rube Goldberg machines.
- But if you want to make it sound like they are, it’s super easy and you can now be a master of the PPT!
