Term of the Week: Localization Project Management System (LPMS)

Why does a technical communicator need to know this?

An LPMS allows companies to manage growing localization demands, volume, and complexity. Implementing an LPMS not only improves efficiency and automation, it allows companies to gain more control over their process and their translation memories (TM), as well as scale their localization spend based on market demand.

These systems have evolved from client-server or web server systems to cloud services, and they scale to support the full range of language service providers. Workbenches provide role-based dashboards with automated messaging and workflow management.

System capabilities, customization, and configuration vary, but typically include these features:

• Business Management:
  • project management
  • vendor or client management
  • financial control and accounting
• Process Management:
  • workflow configurations for diverse business needs
  • change management
  • support for different methodologies (waterfall, Agile, etc.)
  • content processing that facilitates organization, management, allocation, and automation of the supply chain
• File/Content Exchange: options range from manual file transfer (file upload, SFTP) to automated exchange via system connectors using web services and programmatic interfaces.
• Language Processing and Analysis:
  • support for multiple content types and formats
  • centralized language assets
  • company or third-party linguistic review
  • integrated machine translation
• Analytics and Reporting:
  • service performance (time, quality, metrics) with trends
  • costs, including re-use analysis
  • status reporting of schedules and tasks
  • governance and quality management

LPMSes can have wider application to foster knowledge sharing across languages or to apply Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools in authoring environments, which promotes reuse in the original language. This, in turn, increases reuse in translation and lowers translation costs.