Idiom pre-briefed Common Sense Advisory last month, giving us an extended demo of WorldServer 9 which it announced today. We applaud Idiom’s focus on collaborative product development, involving the community who suggested and then vetted new features. While many software companies do this, participation of the entire language supply chain through its LSP Advantage program made for a rich set of viewpoints to balance and prioritize. Here are some highlights of the results:

• Terminology management has become a lifecycle process flow rather than simply a vocabulary list. Real-world users see terminology development as a collaborative process with distinct workflow states for proposing, commenting, reviewing, and approving new terms. This flow is separate from translation workflow, and often involves different resources.
• Every segment now has its own review status. Translators working in a large-scale deployment will see an immediate benefit here. For instance, as your translator preps the marketing collateral for your own new product release, segments from the documentation or software localization projects will be available in the system, even if not yet approved, and that status is visible to the translator. “Mon Dieu!” cries the translator, quickly messaging the reviewer to propose a more marketing friendly turn of phrase.
• MT output has joined the list of recognized source types within WorldServer, improving options for translation buyers and providers. The new functionality make it easier to flow MT results into a translation process, either as a weighted segment that translators can select from among TM matches, or as a fully automated, touchless translation. Idiom announced relationships with Language Weaver and SYSTRAN earlier this year.
• TransPort goes beyond the earlier service desk to grant business users access to translation resources, job status, and reports. Collaboration is at the core of any translation management system and we are glad to see this renewed focus from Idiom. WorldServer collaboration features are not yet fully exposed via the many programmatic interfaces in its software development kit (SDK), but we expect this to happen in subsequent updates.

But there are plenty more items that did not see the light of day in this release, including:

• WorldServer’s job costing still limits non-translation tasks to charges and discounts as a fixed percentage of total word costs. That won’t cut it for most shops, whether an internal translation department or at an LSP. Project management, DTP, localization engineering, and testing need to be bid, tracked, and invoiced as hourly or as piece rates.
• A system level self-learning feedback loop whereby auto-generated quotes are compared to final job costs to improve accuracy of initial job estimates. This would provide built-in process improvement to all groups, but especially to those companies using MT output. In this case the feature would help the quoting mechanism adapt as the availability of pre-translated segments improves time and cost parameters. From our conversations with LSPs and companies with large internal translation groups, we know that this feature benefit WorldServer users of all stripes.

WorldServer increasingly touches consumers of translation services who are normally distant from the translation process. Line managers and knowledge workers who need access to a translation service may see translation options appear in their everyday enterprise application. Thanks to Idiom’s steadily improving SDK, developers can stitch WorldServer functions into any services-based application architecture. With this release, Idiom’s business rules engine is now open, allowing customers to write custom clauses – fancy footwork that is required for interacting with other systems not inherently known to WorldServer.

Although Idiom insists on calling WorldServer a “globalization management system” (GMS) in the body of the press release, the lead heading genuflects to the preferred “TMS” designation by saying V9 “redefines translation management” — hyperbole is an essential component of most press releases we read. That said, we would instead characterize this version of WorldServer as a solid advance for the industry’s most seasoned TMS product.