Choosing TMS based on business requirements in practice

Melanie Yang
May 22, 2022
3 min read

What we should do and why

Choosing the TMS, or translation management system, is a central part of a localization project, as it will be impactful from start to finish. There are plenty of options in the market with different priorities and capabilities, and choosing a suboptimal one can result in unnecessary costs or unsatisfactory results for the company.

Fitting a TMS to a company is like a much larger version of fitting a dish/movie/game/hobby to a person. We need to know the preferences, background, and needs of the company to make the best recommendations. My team performed a case study for anatomy.app, a medical major learning platform.

Company information and requirements

Anatomy.app is an online anatomy learning platform providing educational tools and materials to learn about human anatomy. It is a popular source for medical students and utilizes many media types such as 3D and 2D models, text, images, audio, color coding and more.

For this case study, we identified 7 business requirements that the company may have for its TMS.

the TMS should support CMS integration. Anatomy.app makes use of many multimedia assets, thus will need to export and import data in batches between itself and its TS for safety and convenience.
the TMS should have some form of in-context preview to edit and resolve UI or UX issues directly.
the TMS should have good QA support such as auto QA or RegEX, as well as professional postediting. This is especially important for localizing medical content since accuracy is the biggest concern.
the TMS should have customizable and automated workflows, given the complexity of the website and platform.
the TMS should have a cloud-based solution to support remote work and better document sharing, for better efficiency.
the TMS should contain a universal and simple platform for tracking tasks and communicating between collaborators on a project.
the TMS should be cost-effective and scalable, as the platform and company are likely to grow larger over time.

All of these performance metrics will also have a weight ratio to represent their relative importance and necessity, with the CMS integration being the most critical and weighted the most.

Making comparison with pilot projects

The two TMS providers that we made the comparison on are Wordbee and XTM, and the language pairs we selected for pilot projects are Chinese and English. The next step is to evaluate the two TMS for the company’s criteria identified.

Both platforms have very strong CMS integration for multimedia, different file formats, and sending data back and forth with the source.

Both platforms have good coverage for in-context previews with source and target content, while both have pseudo translation features.

Both platforms support auto QA with good postediting, but Wordbee does not support RegEX and XTM has a potential for customized QA.

XTM has a better integrated communication system, where clients can be set to be project watchers and can receive email notifications for almost all the important project events.

The two TMS has similar strengths in the other performance metrics.

Making a decision

After giving scores to both TMS for all the business requirements, we could see that XTM has a higher final weighted total than Wordbee. We can make a recommendation to Anatomy.app to use XTM as its translation management system for this case study.

The workflow of understanding company background --- identifying business needs --- making comparisons based on the metrics --- deciding based on scores received should be accurate and trustworthy for finding the best TMS for a company, as it covers everything that needs to be done and the relative importance of each. We should be confident making recommendations with this method as localization managers.