Simple alternative to Translation Manager?

Question

We have a pure Tridion installation, without Translation Manager.I found quite frustrating and hard maintaining multiple language sites through its normal GUI. Searching for content components and localizing them, extracting textual content to provide to translation companies(eighter manual translation or machine) and then reformatting the content of components, publishing them, etc. Is not a user freindly way to do this.how others are doing this? Which tools are used or built to optimize these steps and automatize these processes?

We have built core of an application which could actually be an alternative to Translation Manager. All this running on client side as a simple application with an OS friendly GUI interface. Functionalities covering or planning to cover in our tool:

1. Login/authorization to Tridion
2. selecting a page in a publication and by hitting a button in our client tool, all the necessary content components are being extracted from Tridion - This will be the source of the translation
3. Extracted content component XHTML/XML data can be saved easily to a local or network folder into filex
4. Content components in the destination publication will be automatically localized
5. Extracted XHTML will be sent for tranlsation
6. After we get back the translated XHTML files we import them back to Tridion - it will automatically update the previousily localized components in the destination publication
7. Will be able to publish all the necessary components, page component, etc. - by hitting a button after import of translated content is done

All this is solved on client side, thinking about and planning additional functionalities, optimizations of the above process. Also thinking about attaching it to a simple database, but depends what we may need.

Just trying to build something as a cheaper and more simple alternative to Translation Manager. Anyone else with similar goals, or is there something similar "tool" available already?

We didn't change anything on Tridion server, we are planning to achieve this only by running a client side application and doing bulk of actions according to our needs via its GUI.

Thanks, bvl

Answer 1

A simple alternative to Translation Manager, that would be a human. From that point onwards it doesn't matter if that human does actual translation or is guided by tools or websites to do the actual translation, unless you are looking at costs.

SDL Translation Manager and its integration with SDL Tridion is basically a workflow tool (for efficiency and tracking) with a translation memory database plus access to translation expertise for the parts of the translation that are not (yet) stored in memory. The whole concept and idea of Translation Manager is to get more bang for your buck (an optimized process and buying in your translation expertise in bulk).

So if in a simple alternative you also mean a cheaper alternative, then I would say hire cheap labor that uses a free translation website. But keep in mind, going cheaper will then often mean reducing quality too. This is what you would get when you for instance use Google Translate to translate your content. It doesn't cost much, but the translations aren't really good either.

Answer 2

If you want to do translation in an external application you should use SDL Language Weaver or Google Translate or any other translation service.

SDL Language Weaver is not free and you may need to contact the SDL sales team to acquire a license. SDL Language Weaver will provide you a set of REST APIs that can be used by your application in order to translate content. It comes with 2 APIs a Synchronous and an Asynchronous API, you can use the synchronous for short amounts of text and the asynchronous one to large amount of text.