This week, Lionbridge announced the upcoming release of Translation Workspace, the long-promised production management system that it says will be available early in 2010. The company will offer its software as a service (SaaS) product to freelancers, translation agencies, and enterprises — although it’s aiming its initial marketing effort squarely at the translation industry rather than end-clients.

Common Sense Advisory estimates that over 20,000 providers hang out a shingle offering translation services, and more than 300,000 individuals earn all or part of their living in the business. Many employ less automation than they should. This announcement disrupts the translation industry status quo by offering enterprise-class technology to the “little guy.”

Freelancers who receive most or all work from other participants in the system only pay the nominal base fee. In addition to project management and reporting, the translator interfaces in Translation Workspace include a Microsoft Word plug-in, an XLIFF editor, and an online review and markup tool. Self-provisioning through the GeoWorks portal means immediate access to anyone, with no negotiation and no need to pick up the phone. Pricing will have two components: 1) Users signing up at GeoWorkz.com pay a nominal fee, monthly or yearly, for setting up an account in the system; and 2) account holders will be charged a metered use fee, similar to the way utilities charge for natural gas or electricity.

The big question is “why is Lionbridge opening up its platform to competitors?” We see three reasons:

1. To create an ecosystem. Supply-side industry participants are more likely to be Lionbridge partners than competitors. By selling “picks and shovels” to translation vendors the company creates a revenue stream to underwrite the cost of managing and further developing the application.
2. To eliminate the sole supplier stigma. One of the chief complaints about the platform has been that the only company using it is Lionbridge. For that reason, the company’s biggest customers won’t standardize on the current software. With this announcement, Lionbridge eliminates a key objection from its sales process.
3. To take the battle to its technology rivals. SDL claims to control 90 percent of the global content supply chain — Lionbridge would like to increase its share. As LSPs move their work onto the now open platform, Lionbridge expects they will buy or upgrade fewer SDL Trados licenses.

Lionbridge sees the industry paradigm shifting from supply-chain to community and this move positions the company at the center of that universe. Logoport, the core technology on offer here, is that same software through which Lionbridge has pumped two billion words in recent years. However, the community capabilities are new — not just new to Logoport, but new to multi-tenant applications in general. For example, “Asset Aliasing” allows a content owner to create a virtual workspace that stitches together participants from multiple licensees to collaborate on a specific task. This capability will reduce friction in the translation ecosystem while preserving control of intellectual property and privacy.

But this is a Version 1 product with the inevitable missing features, such as integration with content management systems or other translation environments. Business continuity continues to be a concern for companies living in the cloud (witness Google’s infamous outage), but Translation Workspace runs on a best-in-class SLA backed by a SAS 70 Type II certified data center. Case-hardened software sold at metered usage pricing has the potential to shake up the market. With Lionbridge joining a small cadre of other LSPs that have commercialized their systems and SDL revamping its solutions, we expect that the next edition of our TMS shoot-out will highlight some real innovation in the translation management sector.