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.