Translation efficiency can be very high when you have a dedicated translation team and a tightly defined and managed process. If you find yourself in a fluid development environment where the translation team, reviewers, or process frequently change, maintenance overhead can seriously degrade efficiency. GlobalSite offers a very interesting solution for maintaining control over the entire translation process. Writers upload their files to a web application, which then strips out the plain text, triggers a workflow to notify the translators and reviewers, allows the translators and reviewers to work directly withing the web application, reinserts the translated text, and generates the final output.

Remarkably, this solution is free. Could this be the future of translation? It certainly appears to be very promising, especially if the open source community contributes.

You can read more about this solution on the GlobalSite website. They also have a demo.

The SaaS (software as a service) model has been both liberating and controversial. SaaS vendors host applications on their hardware and license access to customers, often via web access. The benefits can be significant: no worrying about maintaining hardware or upgrading software. The downsides are that you have to store your data offsite - what happens to your files if the vendor ceases to exist or you fail to renew your license?

Regardless, many mission critical applications have successfully transitioned to a SaaS model. I’m excited to see single sourcing now available in this format. Here is the press release from DocZone:

Audubon, PA – January 20, 2010 – DocZone by Really Strategies, Inc., the industry’s first award-winning software as a service (SaaS) XML content management system, delivers multi-channel output from single-source content at an affordable rate.  DocZone Publisher offers publishers an all-inclusive web-based editorial and production system that supports the creation, management, translation, and single-source publishing of content.

“DocZone offers automatic ‘push-button publishing’ to print, web, and E-book formats. Our subscription-based pricing models provide a very affordable alternative to publishers with tight budgets,” stated Dan Dube, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Really Strategies, Inc. “One of our customers reported a reduced time-to-market by 50% while increasing translation capabilities by publishing to more than 30 languages.”

DocZone Publisher offers CMS functionality in one system and provides out of the box support for high-end XML-based composition to PDF, HTML, EPUB, online help, and MS-Word formats.

To learn more about DocZone, or to schedule your demo, please visit http://www.doczone.com/.

There is a very nice summary of help authoring tools available in the market at indoition, a technical writing services company in Germany:

http://www.indoition.com/online-help-authoring-tools-survey.htm

This is as complete a list as I have seen.