Home
Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
Finance management
The main reason for investing in a TMS is to reduce costs that your organization spends on translation in general. See how can this tool help you achieve it.
Rate cards
Rate cards make it easy to estimate costs, calculate a project's budget or choose the most cost-effective language vendor.

Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
- Project management
  Even though the primary goal of a TMS is to automate a lot of tasks in the translation process, it still requires people to manage it.
- Finance management
  The main reason for investing in a TMS is to reduce costs that your organization spends on translation in general. See how can this tool help you achieve it.
  - Rate cards
    Rate cards make it easy to estimate costs, calculate a project's budget or choose the most cost-effective language vendor.
  - Purchase orders
    A Purchase Order is the specification of costs that your vendors (e.g. translators, LSPs) will charge you.
- Content management
  A TMS maintains all the translation-related content centrally to be accessed in real time.
- Translation editor (Workbench)
  Currently, hardly anyone translates in an original document, be it Word, HTML file or InDesign. Most translators and reviewers work in special text editors that are core CAT tool components.
- Quality management
  There are still discussions on what should be considered a high-quality translation. Is it an error-free document in the target language or the smooth process where every step complies with the established procedure?
- Machine translation
  Machine translation engines are third-party systems for automatic translation that are not standard components of a TMS.
- Connectors
  Learn how to gain more control over your content by integrating content management systems and translation management systems via a connector.
- Security
  Nowadays, data security is on top of mind of all businesses, with the translation industry being no exception.
- Documentation
  When you start working with a new tool, it is extremely useful to have relevant documentation at hand to refer to it when you need it.
- Support
  High-quality documentation is useful, but in some cases it may not be enough. As with every IT tool, with TMSs you can also experience technical problems.
- Product development
  You have bought a TMS and what comes next? Since every IT tool is upgraded from time to time and you get the new version instantly if you use the cloud-based software, you need to be ready for constant changes.

Rate cards

Rate cards make it easy to estimate costs, calculate a project's budget or choose the most cost-effective language vendor.

They are available for all XTM users from the Users tab and are easily customizable.

All you need is to enter a language combination and get the following information from your vendors:

language pairs
base rate, e.g. € 0.10
percentage rates for different categories of matches (repetitions, MT matches, etc.)

Here is a sample rate card for a translator:

Sample rate card in XTM — Figure 1. Sample rate card in XTM

Based on this data, XTM generates a purchase order automatically for a translation project as a .pdf file, which you can send to your vendor for approval. This automates the process and considerably shortens the translation turnaround time, because the quotation process can be very time consuming. In addition, you know exactly how much you will pay. Of course, it works well if you gather all this data well in advance, e.g. from the Cooperation Agreement signed with your vendor.