Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla,SharePoint, etc. are widely used today. In most cases, they are used to create and maintain websites, both for personal use by individuals and for commercial use by companies. When people discuss about website localization, a common question is “how to localize a website?”. If a company wants to localize its website into another language, how do they translate the materials from the website that they are managing? The answer is: using API integration, given by Mr. Jim Compton from RWS Moravia.
Mr. Jim Compton gave us a lecture about TAPICC during theIMUG events at Adobe Head Quarter. TAPICC refers to the Translation API Classand Cases, where API is the abbreviation of Application program interface.
TAPICC is managed by the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), and involves a number of technology companies, Language Service Providers (LSP). According to GALA, TAPICC is “a collaborative, community-driven, open-source project to advance API standards for multilingual content delivery.” In 1990s, there was a big gap between Content Management System and Translation Management System (TMS),there were no conformed standards between these two technologies, and there were no systems that act as a bridge to connect these two together, thus, an integration, system to system communication system to facilitate the automation between content management and translation management is desired.
The initiatives of TAPICC is separated into 4 tracks. The first track is to support business metadata for supply chain automation. TAPICC is working on harmonization and compatibility, and this is to some extent the core track of TAPICC, as it wants to connect different management systems and platforms, making it suitable for various models. It has also defined several task types, including localization, translation, internationalization, DTP, and so on. The payload of each task is also specified in the system.
The second track of TAPICC is about unit-level exchange. The difference between track two and track one is that the first track is about exchanging contents between different organizations, while the second track is exchanging contents between different platforms, such as TMS or translation editors. In addition to it, track two is real time synchronous. It supports transferring data from a TMS to another TMS, or Machine translation system to TMS, and vice versa.
The third track is about semantic enrichment of unit. Although it hasn’t started yet, its goal is to enrich translation memories (TM), term bases and machine translations. The fourth track is to support visual contexts.Desktop Publishing is a common single step in Localization industry. The texts given to the translators are not always in an editable text formats, it can be visual contexts in videos or images. This track aims to make TAPICC compatible with these formats.
Benefits: Although TAPICC is still under developing, the benefits of applying TAPICC in the future is very visible. TAPICC solves, or will solve the problems that contents are hard to exchange over different systems. It facilitates many processes in localization and makes them ready for automation since TAPICC removes the incompatibility among these systems, and therefore a more standardized, conformed localization workflow can be established. TAPICC not only boosts the working efficiency, but also brings more consistencies by employing this integrated tool.