As part of the continuum of my hands-on and technology focused master’s degree, I took Professor Adam Wooten’s class on Translation Management Systems (TMS) during my second semester at MIIS. This course gave us the opportunity to explore different TMSs such as SDL WorldServer, GlobalLink, Lingotek, and others. We discussed the pros and cons of each TMS, and what are the factors and the needs to be considered in the process of choosing a TMS for a company. We worked on two main projects throughout the semester; one was a TMS comparison project for a hypothetical client, and the other was a TMS consulting project for a real client. Below I am going to give a brief overview of both projects.
Project 1: TMS Group Comparison
For our first project, we were required to compare between two TMSs; SDL WorldServer and GlobalLink, for our hypothetical client who is in the process of selecting a TMSs for their business. During this project, we wore many hats. We were the client, the project manager, the linguists and the marketers. We had the chance to evaluate each TMS from the different perspective of each stakeholder while considering their needs. We ran an example project through both TMSs, and we weighed the pros and cons of each TMS in a scorecard that my teammates and I established based on the needs of each stakeholder.
Below are the basic business requirements we identified for our client:
Based on our results and assessment of the client’s needs and our own
online research, GlobalLink was what we recommended. We discussed our findings with the client in our final presentation.
You can check out our presentation on the findings and our scorecard, if you want to know more about the project.
Project 2: TMS Group Consulting Project
Our second project for this class was a consulting project for a real client, who have their own TMS but are looking to add improvements, and possibly new features, to make it ready to meet the competitive market standards.
For confidentiality reasons, I am not going to share the project files here, instead I am going to discuss the project in full.
Following a kick-off meeting with the client, we were divided up into groups based on different stakeholders. We were required to assess the current features and functions of the client’s TMS and identify areas of improvement.
My team evaluated the TMS from the project manager standpoint. We were able to identify multiple areas for improvement, most of them had to do with project automation, such as:
- automatic passing of project files from translator to the PM and vice versa;
- assigning projects to translators during the project creation stage;
- notifications system; and
- quoting system.
One major area of improvement was the user help files and onboarding documentation. The client’s TMS lacked any kind of documentation which we identified as a major downside of this TMS, because it is quite unusual to find any tool without proper documentation.
All our recommendations were discussed in full in a recorded presentation that we delivered to our client.
This course gave us a great overview of the TMSs available in the market. We learned how to carry out a selection process, from identifying basic business requirements to the actual implementation. We also had the chance to actually try out these TMSs which, I believe, prepared us to be able to use any TMS we haven’t tried before.
