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Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
Content management
A TMS maintains all the translation-related content centrally to be accessed in real time.
Alignment
While alignment is a feature shared with a lot of CAT tools, its use can vary from very difficult to extremely easy so you should choose your TMS carefully.

Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
- Project management
  Even though the primary goal of a TMS is to automate a lot of tasks in the translation process, it still requires people to manage it.
- Finance management
  The main reason for investing in a TMS is to reduce costs that your organization spends on translation in general. See how can this tool help you achieve it.
- Content management
  A TMS maintains all the translation-related content centrally to be accessed in real time.
  - Translation memories
    TMs are the most important of all translation resources so it's important to choose a TMS that has the most options to manage them easily.
  - Alignment
    While alignment is a feature shared with a lot of CAT tools, its use can vary from very difficult to extremely easy so you should choose your TMS carefully.
  - Termbases
    Using a termbase is an excellent solution for terminology management. TMSs should have relevant features to make your work easier and quicker.
  - Terminology extraction
    Computer-aided terminology extraction proves useful when you need to search for customer-specific vocabulary.
  - Concordance
    Context is the king in translation. Here is how Concordance helps linguists make the most of translation resources in XTM.
  - Language variants
    Some languages have variants that you want to preserve in separate translation memories. However, a problem appears if you want to leverage on cost reductions due to a high number of matches from a TM with a different language variant.
- Translation editor (Workbench)
  Currently, hardly anyone translates in an original document, be it Word, HTML file or InDesign. Most translators and reviewers work in special text editors that are core CAT tool components.
- Quality management
  There are still discussions on what should be considered a high-quality translation. Is it an error-free document in the target language or the smooth process where every step complies with the established procedure?
- Machine translation
  Machine translation engines are third-party systems for automatic translation that are not standard components of a TMS.
- Connectors
  Learn how to gain more control over your content by integrating content management systems and translation management systems via a connector.
- Security
  Nowadays, data security is on top of mind of all businesses, with the translation industry being no exception.
- Documentation
  When you start working with a new tool, it is extremely useful to have relevant documentation at hand to refer to it when you need it.
- Support
  High-quality documentation is useful, but in some cases it may not be enough. As with every IT tool, with TMSs you can also experience technical problems.
- Product development
  You have bought a TMS and what comes next? Since every IT tool is upgraded from time to time and you get the new version instantly if you use the cloud-based software, you need to be ready for constant changes.

Alignment

While alignment is a feature shared with a lot of CAT tools, its use can vary from very difficult to extremely easy so you should choose your TMS carefully.

The alignment tool matches the source and target language files side-by-side to determine which pairs belong together. The result is a parallel text (bitext).

You use it if you have the translated versions of your documents, but the translation wasn’t performed in a CAT tool so you don't have a translation memory. Now these documents need to be updated or changed across the languages and you want to retain the existing content, style and terminology. In addition, you wish to reduce costs, because there are a lot of repetitions and matches.

Alignment in XTM — Figure 1. Alignment in XTM

TMSs are of great help here because this is a built-in feature. All you have to do is go to TM > Align, upload two documents (in source and target languages), run the alignment and analyze the results. In XTM you get an Excel file with texts in two columns and a probability score.

Result of XTM alignment — Figure 2. Result of XTM alignment

You need to check it thoroughly and, if everything is done, upload the file in the TM import tab. Then, the translation memory is updated automatically.

XTM Align creates two Excel spreadsheets for each alignment: one with 90+ probability of accurate alignment (quick check and upload) and the other with all texts.

The only disadvantage is that the Align feature in XTM is shared with all of the customers on the cloud so sometimes it takes a long time for the file to be returned. It also takes longer if you build a dictionary for a new language pair.

Note: In XTM the Align feature is only available for the enterprise account (it is not available for freelance or group accounts).