Lionbridge introduces collaboration tool

Lionbridge Technologies Inc. has introduced Freeway 2.0, an online collaboration tool that will enable customers to work more efficiently with Lionbridge staff and translation partners, according to an executive of the company.

Freeway was built by Lionbridge as its online production environment for its own teams, and the company now plans to offer its customers and freelance translators free connection points into the production environment, said Kevin Bolen, the company’s chief marketing officer. The service will be hosted by Lionbridge.

Lionbridge of Waltham, Massachusetts, offers localization and translation services to ISVs (independent software vendors) and organizations with software applications and content in multiple locations with different language requirements.

With software becoming a Web-based subscription service and vendors offering streaming feature updates for software, new releases are out more quickly than they used to be, Bolen said. This means that software localization has to become more of an “on demand” service as vendors can no longer delay localized versions of products in multiple languages, he said.

“When you are on the Web, you are in every market simultaneously,” he added.

The Freeway tool enables Lionbridge’s translation teams in various countries, design teams in India, testing groups in China, and desktop publishing teams in Eastern Europe, Brazil and India to work together in real time. The Freeway tool also enables Lionbridge to distribute the work across different locations, depending on where it is more cost-effective to do the work, according to Bolen.

Clients, Lionbridge staff and translators can access their Freeway environment via a Web browser. Once inside, they can initiate projects, upload and download assets, manage glossaries and translation memories, and track the status of a single project or their entire history of work.

Freeway uses native Web services to integrate with clients’ development and publication processes. Customers flag content for translation in their content management system and it is automatically exported to Lionbridge for processing, Bolen said. When the translation is completed, the content is automatically imported back into the client system for publishing.