The Advantages and Disadvantages of Basecamp.
After using Basecamp today, I get myself familiarized with how to create a translation project and assign each of the tasks to everyone, including translator, quality assurance, project manager. From my perspective, Basecamp is fancier in terms of UI and layout. And I am sure it
will work perfectly with relatively less sophisticated translation projects as it provides easy-to-learn guides and more efficient ways of communication with different parties. I am also impressed by the function that will automatically send emails when any changes are made, so we don’t need to send emails back and forth manually for alerts. The discussion forum makes everything easier when confirmations with each other are needed, whereas in WorldSever, all communications and dissuasions have to be done through other platforms. In this sense, Basecamp is more user-friendly and time-saving compared with other TMS, like WorldSever. Besides, Basecamp enables us to keep close track of what is going on on calendar and tells everyone the daily tasks on to-do list. More dedicated TMS tools like WorldSever are less attractive in terms of UI and they require different settings and creations before a translation project starts, for example, we are supposed to set up new locales, workgroup of users, workflow, TM and TD group, among others.
When it comes to workflow, a key feature of WorldServer is the ability to use workflows to manage the entire translation or document publishing process. A workflow defines a standard, repeatable process for translating and handling content. An individual workflow consists of steps, and transitions that link the steps together, imposing an order in which the steps occur. A task corresponds to a single asset in a single project going through a workflow for a single target locale. However, Basecamp needs project managers to set up workflows and the template of a workflow can be stored and accessed again next time. Another shortcoming of Basecamp is that it is just a general management system, thus not providing translation memories and term base that will enable translators to refer to. In this sense, Basecamp is not an ideal platform for a complicated translation project or sometimes a project that has to be stored for future reference. For example, a tech company would probably choose WorldSever over Basecamp, because a lot of terms and translations have to be stored and accessed in the following projects. In Worldsever, a project group contains two or more projects that share the same name and workgroup, are created at the same time and contain the same assets, but have different locales, while in Basecamp, we can not create different locales for the same project that needs to be translated into different languages. In common practice, it is not recommended that clients can communicate with translators directly for the fear that translator would steal projects form Project managers. Although Basecamp allows project manager not to show discussion contents to clients, clients can still access the contact information of different parties, including translators.
