Trados and Tridion. A match made in heaven

Peanut Butter and Jelly. Fish and Chips. Macaroni and Cheese. Spaghetti and Meatballs. Bacon and Eggs. With some minor exceptions – such as the Friends episode featuring Rachel’s mistaken Thanksgiving Day trifle concoction, that predictably only Joey could eat – some food just tastes better together! Indeed, some things in life generally just go better together too.

 

Enter Trados Enterprise. RWS’s cloud-first intelligent translation management solution featuring all the translation productivity bells and whistles you would expect, including enhanced workflow and project management capabilities, translation memories, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and of course, the ability to take advantage of the marketplace’s principal CAT tool, Trados Studio, which offers both desktop and online editing.

 

Enter Tridion. RWS’s industry leading solution for boosting your customer, partner and employee experiences through enterprise-wide structured content authoring and collaboration, enriched with the right metadata and classification information, to easily manage and deliver large volumes of content to omnichannel endpoints.

 

Trados and Tridion. Tridion and Trados. Both are exceptional in their own right and provide customers with a significant Return on Investment (ROI) in helping their teams effectively and efficiently manage their content management lifecycle or their translation supply chain. But what if it’s an “and,” not an “or” proposition? Get the best of both worlds. Have your cake and eat it! With very little apology for continuing the food analogies, wouldn’t a truly optimized, global content and translation supply chain solution, underpinned with enterprise-level infrastructure providing organizations the scalability and flexibility to expand as their business needs evolve, be shall we say, flavorful and appetizing? Throw in future proofing your solution with RWS’s machine translation and AI expertise and vision, and we could consider that mouthwatering. 

 

But why are they so good together? Partnering Tridion with Trados Enterprise brings the richness of RWS’s translation heritage directly into the content management authoring environment by letting you directly submit, track and store all your translated content centrally, allowing faster time to market in more regions, while reusing previous translation and optimizing output with AI features.

 

With translation support baked in, the Tridion translation job request process is streamlined at the click of a button – and all communication and content transfer between the systems is immediate. This level of automation reduces the time and effort typically spent sending translations back and forth via email or FTP transfers – and furthermore, you can track the status of content in translation, in real time.

 

Through the underlying content reuse that is inherently designed for Tridion’s content components, your content deliverables already have greater consistency in their source language, and this only increases with translation – saving considerable time and cost. Since Tridion manages componentized content, there is no need to submit entire documents or pages into the translation process. The solution handles the heavy lifting for you, tracking what’s been translated before and only sending the items that need to be translated, reducing the overall workload on both the system and those involved with the end-to-end translation process.

 

With configurable translation workflows throughout Tridion and Trados, the system can support your preferred processes and translation modality, including final editing and reviewing processes before translated content is approved and published. Suppose there have been updates to source content. In that case, Tridion will seamlessly send only those components for translation, and given that Trados knows and loves translation memory, you don’t have to retranslate any content you have already translated elsewhere. These translation optimization features significantly reduce translation costs and speed up the translation process. For further growth and acceleration, options also abound for incorporating another flagship offering from the RWS menu, by directly plugging Language Weaver into your automated translation workflows to provide enterprise-grade machine translation that is secure by design, infinitely adaptive and fully scalable.

 

All translated content within Tridion is automatically versioned and stored in the correct place in the content management environment, associated with the source language for easy management. With Tridion’s automated publishing to any language and endpoint, many customers have completely eliminated their desktop publishing effort for translated versions, producing dramatic time and cost savings that can then be invested elsewhere. In fact, many customers choose to reinvest their cost savings in translation processes to allow them to expand the number of languages covered for their markets.

 

And finally, does the pairing of these two industry leading software solutions have the scale to support truly global enterprises and their content translation volumes? Of course! Rest assured, the direct and tight integration has been tested to meet the most stringent volume requirements.

 

So, whether you prefer bacon and eggs, cereal and milk, toast and marmalade, or maybe pancakes and syrup in the morning, some things are simply better together. If you use either Tridion or Trados today, then congratulations as you have tasted the appetizer! If you use neither today, perhaps you find yourself hungry for this “whole enchilada” solution?

 

If you're interested to know more about optimizing your content management and translation management processes for content reuse, translation reuse, automation and cost savings, contact the Tridion team.

 

You can also contact the Trados team for more information on how our range of secure, intelligent translation solutions enables everyone across the global translation supply chain to streamline, centralize, and manage their translation work efficiently.