An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud-Based Translation Management Systems for Translators

Today the main concern of translation industry is producing not the highest but the expected level of quality in short turnaround times at lower costs. It has long been agreed that this is not possible without the collaboration of human and machine. Therefore, new ways of human-machine interaction that will address this concern have been sought. In 2010, the industry saw the introduction of a new generation of translation technology which is based on the known translation memory technology. Its name is cloud-based translation management system (TMS). The system combines translation memory technology with software as a service (SaaS) model. Most simply, it is a type of translation memory system which stores data (translation memory system and all other resources for translation such as glossaries, translation memories, stylesheets, etc.) on remote servers rather than local drivers as in desktop translation memory systems. In SaaS model, software is supplied over the Internet as a service rather than installed on computers. Data is processed on remote computers accessed via the Internet. And any computing device with a standard Web browser could be used for data entry and display. So what happens in the cloud stays in the cloud. Cloud-based TMSs (such as Motaword, Memsource Cloud, XTM Cloud, Wordbee, MateCat, Wordfast Anywhere, Google Translator’s Toolkit and Lionbridge Translation Workspace) have advantages as well as disadvantages for translators. The aim of this study is to introduce this relatively new technology and evaluate its advantages and disadvantages for translators. In order to make a deep analysis, a specific systems was selected and the evaluation was performed on this system.

Keywords

advantages, cloud-based translation management systems, disadvantages, software as a service model,