The newbie’s guide for 2025

Many language service providers reach out to us that they heard from their translation end customer that they are using some system to manage their content, and would like to connect it directly to their translation provider. Content Management Systems (CMS) can be tricky, but worry not, we got some advice for you.

But first you have to answer: why does a customer want me to integrate with their system rather than using my customer portal?

Many translation companies complain that they are trying to push their customer portals to their customers but the customer just does not want to start using it. Customer portals, despite their name, help providers much more than they help their customers. Yes, customers can log in, see some analytics, see the jobs in progress, but when you get access to an amazing customer portal from your electricity/banking/water/insurance/phone provider, do you enjoy logging in? Not really, because unless you use it often, you expect problems with the password, you forget the site URL, and so on. Customers don’t like to use a customer portal in the majority of cases. Instead, they want you to integrate with their system, since it is the most comfortable and fast-paced option.

So now that you understand the customer’s perspective, let’s see what questions you need to clarify.

Question 1: What type of system is it?

There are four major system types that customers want integration with:

  • Task management systems such as JIRA, Trello, Asana, Workfront, etc. They want to create a user for you, and assign jobs there. These cards or tasks contain metadata and files as well. Thus metadata and files are useful for “translating” information from the customer system.
  • Online file repositories to transfer files, such as Dropbox, Box, Sharepoint. This is the most simple of cases. Most likely they just want you to pick up files from there and use that files to work. Surely you’ll be granted access to drop the final files once you, the LSP, finish the work.
  • Web or other content management systems (CMS) or product information management systems (PIM) such as WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, AEM, Sitecore, Optimizely, Magento.
  • Translation Management Systems (TMS) such as Smartling, GlobalLink, Worldserver, Phrase, XTM, memoQ, etc.

Question 2: What is the expected service?

In other words: of the content you can see in the client’s previously mentioned systems, what you should and what you should not translate? Three factors influence this:

  1. Whether a content piece needs to be translated? An English marketing material that the headquarters prepared most likely needs to be translated to the languages of all countries a company operates in, but when their South-American subsidiaries work on marketing campaigns, most probably the content will never have to make it to China.
  2. Whether a content piece is ready for translation? Most companies only want you to start translating content once it is final and publishable in the language it was written in.
  3. Whether a content piece has the funding to be translated? This is where the topic of quoting and approvals comes in.

You will find that task management systems and translation management systems do not leave ambiguity. What you need to do and when is usually described nicely within the card or the task.

On the other hand, online file repositories may be used only to share files with you, and a link comes in an email or some other way. You may need to monitor those folders shared with you for changes and there may or may not be clear and more obvious instructions like the mentioned above.

Finally, we have web CMSes that function as a repository of content. The customer may want to keep everything in sync (e.g. international product catalog), or they may want to tell you that you should work on something.

A significant consideration: on every translation project there has to be a trigger that signals that you can start working on the project. Ask your customer what information or action inside or outside the system (e.g. “we will change the status from Draft to Published”, or “we will send you an email with a link”) will tell you what you can work on, and ask about whether quoting is needed.

Also, take into account that most customers are used to quoting and manual control. But content management integration does not particularly bode well with manual control processes, so, instead of having to do many back and forths with quoting, we recommend communicating your price list. This way, you can set up rules where quoting is not needed. Multilingual content should be an expectation, not an exception!

Your answer should be: Yes, we can.

Content integration is always possible, however, it may be simple or complex, and this defines the cost and the stakeholders needed.

First of all, be careful with those names that acquired many other systems, such as Salesforce or SAP. You cannot meaningfully ask a question like “Can you integrate with Salesforce?”. You need to ask back: with which system of Salesforce? In what scenario? The better known a name is, the more likely you need more details to give an answer.

For a great CMS integration, these are the questions you should consider yourself and discuss with your client:

What can make CMS integration more complex?

  1. The client wants a way to control from within the system what goes for translation. Even worse if the client wants to even see and approve quotes within this system.
  2. The system is customized to the client’s needs, or contains many modules not widely used.
  3. The system is not publicly hosted, but hosted by the client. What’s especially hard is when you cannot get easy access to the system, for example when you can only access the system from a whitelisted IP address or when you have to use 2-factor authentication.

What’s the simplest integration scenario? 

Do you just need to translate one piece of content at a time, or do you need to monitor changes, and translate any change into the remaining languages? You can create a simple way of periodically polling the APIs and returning translated content without building user interfaces.

Why do you need a complicated tool chain?

What comes out of the CMS is textual (or even multimedia) content. It can easily have a word count, but it does not have any fuzzy analysis up to the moment it is processed by a translation management system or a CAT tool. If you are using a direct integration of a translation management system (e.g. WordPress WPML with XTM) the translation memories are automatically applied. If you don’t, you need to use an integration into a CAT tool via project templates to be able to select and apply the right translation memories. (While other resources such as machine translation or terminology are also important, pricing only depends on translation memory matches.)

The solution

Here is the most common scenario we recommend for full automation at language service providers:

CMS -> Integration platform -> BeLazy -> BMS (-> CAT tool)

The CMS can be:

  • Any of the systems mentioned under question 1
  • If an ordering plugin is needed to be built within the system, it can either be a plugin to the actual system or a browser plugin.

The integration platform needed can be:

  • An orchestrator such as RunMyProcess, Zapier or Make.com in the case of simpler systems (task management systems, online file repositories) or systems where a user interface extension is not needed.
  • An installed piece of software doing the connection, such as a serverless function developed for the integration hosted in the cloud, or a CMS extension that plugs in to the CMS, or a browser extension that CMS users can install.
  • An actual CMS integration platform such as iLangL, Xillio or Wordbee Beebox. They may directly connect to a TMS rather than BeLazy, but in that case BeLazy can pick it up from the TMS.
  • A translation management system such as Crowdin, Lokalise, Phrase, XTM, Worldserver.

You don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, BeLazy does not only offer an automation platform, we also help language industry professionals with finding the right tools for their workflow. So, once the right integration platform is determined, BeLazy is needed to download and process the content via the integration platform into meaningful units, and push it into a language service provider’s Business Management System (BMS) like Plunet or XTRF. Hint: BeLazy’s flexible bundling functionality allows packaging any input into manageable job sizes.

The business management system is needed to keep track of the translation assignments. Its projects archive the history of translations, and you can easily look back how much you translated in any given month, day or year in what combinations. A BMS can be:

  • A system BeLazy supports out of the box, such as Plunet, XTRF, Protemos.
  • A commercial system that is connected to BeLazy via the BeLazy APIs such as Quahill.
  • Your own system that you need to connect to BeLazy via the BeLazy APIs.

The CAT tool is required to create a fuzzy analysis and/or bilingual files, and can be:

  • Any CAT tool integrated with your business management system. Most systems integrate with Trados, memoQ, or Phrase. The terms CAT tool and TMS can be used interchangeably in this context, we use CAT tool to highlight that this system is not integrated with the CMS, it is integrated with the business management system.

Where to start?

The customer told you about their system. Check what integration platforms support it. Remember to ask the customer for the exact product name. Best is some screenshots or video of how they want to use the integration. If they are not willing to give this some thought, most likely their inquiry is not serious.

  1. If the customer is already using a translation management system integrated with their content management system, check out BeLazy’s integrations – it’s likely that there is a very easy way for you to do the full circle.
  2. If there is no TMS deployed, we usually start with Crowdin. Crowdin has 500+ integrations, and all integrations are affordable and easy to try. It may not always be the right fit, but it’s worth a shot, as the combination of Crowdin-BeLazy-Plunet/XTRF-memoQ/Phrase/Trados is tested and proven (also with XLIFF-based translation, not only with translation in Crowdin, so you don’t need to retrain your vendors).
  3. If Crowdin does not have it, check iLangL. iLangL is a solid, reliable provider that specializes on a smaller set of high complexity integration cases.
  4. If iLangL doesn’t have it, the next step depends on the use case and system complexity.
    1. If the customerts an online repository or task management system, Make.com probably has a solution. Check their apps. 
    2. If it’s a complex system, look at the Nimdzi TMS Integration map. Crowdin is not the only TMS that has integrations. Development-oriented TMSes such as Lokalise and Transifex offer generally more affordable licensing than traditional document-oriented TMSes such as XTM, RWS Trados, Phrase TMS or memoQ. Inquire for pricing and capabilities – in the setup above you don’t have to translate in the TMS that integrates with the CMS, but you can export-import XLIFF.
  5. If you need more help, get in touch with us. We provide an affordable service to help you establish quickly the technical possibilities and work together also with your customer if you require us to work on your behalf.

Integrations

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