Translation Management System: Every Request, Vendor, and Cost in One Place
Smartcat pulls content from the tools your teams already use, translates it with AI, routes it to whoever needs to review it, and pushes it back. Every job’s cost is attributable to the campaign, product, or market that asked for it.
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1,000+ enterprise brands run localization in Smartcat.
Why Localization Gets Cut First in a Budget Review
Most companies do not have a translation process. They have translation incidents.
1
There is no queue, only incidents
A request arrives in Slack, another in email, a third as a Jira ticket, and nobody can say what the real queue is or when any of it lands.
2
Files are versioned by filename
campaign_DE_final_v3_REALfinal.docx — and the translation memory, if one exists, lives inside one agency’s system rather than yours. The same product description gets paid for three times in eighteen months, and nobody can prove it did.
3
The invoice is a lump sum
It arrives forty days after the work, with no line item you can map back to a campaign or a market. When someone asks what localization costs and what it returned, the honest answer is that nobody knows — and a line item nobody can defend is the one that gets cut.
What Is a Translation Management System?
A translation management system (TMS) is software that runs the whole translation process in one place. It collects content from the systems that produce it, applies your translation memory and terminology, and routes each job to AI and to human reviewers. It also tracks status and deadlines, manages the linguists doing the work, and reports what it all cost.
Three terms get used interchangeably and should not be.
Machine translation produces a draft — you give it text, it returns a translation; it is an engine, not a process.
A CAT tool is where a human works on that draft, segment by segment, with memory, glossary and quality checks — see CAT tool.
A TMS is everything around the CAT tool: how the content arrived, who was assigned, when it is due, who gets paid, and what it cost.
A freelance translator needs a CAT tool. A team publishing in twelve languages needs all three, connected.
The Four Parts You Will Use Every Day
Vendors describe a TMS differently, but every real one has four parts: intake and connectors, an editor, workflow, and vendor-and-cost management. If a tool only does the editor, it is a CAT tool, not a TMS — and if it does the first three but you still email agencies for quotes, the fourth is where your time goes.
Requests land in one queue instead of three inboxes, each carrying its workflow — AI draft, human review, in-country approval, publish — with an assignee and a due date at every step. A rejected step routes back rather than disappearing. Invite an unlimited number of team members and external collaborators.
Your translation memory and glossary are applied on top of the AI draft, then the result goes to a reviewer if the content warrants one. A release note might not. A regulated label always does. You set that per content type instead of per file.
The linguists are in the same system as the work. Matching finds subject-matter expert translators for the language and content type you actually have, so adding a Finnish reviewer is a workflow step rather than a procurement project.
Onboarding, contract signing, and paying linguists happen in Smartcat, and spend is reported per job — the part most TMS products leave to your finance team and a spreadsheet.
30%
increased project output
Ever since starting to use the Smartcat translation platform, we have increased our project output by 30%.
Read Case Study
Gina Groß
eCommerce Team Lead
Trusted by:
Content Arrives From the Tools Your Teams Already Use
Connect the systems that produce content and translation stops being a handoff. Named integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Zendesk, Notion, Workday, Figma, Shopify, Adobe Experience Manager and Contentful, plus an API and webhooks for anything not on the list. Source text is pulled into Smartcat, translated, post-edited by a linguist where needed, and pushed back into the app it came from. Full list on the integrations page.
Answer What Localization Cost and What It Returned
Spend, volume, throughput and turnaround are reported per team, per language and per project, so the localization line item in a budget review has line items behind it. Reports cover cost, total words translated, words per hour, and usage across teams — the numbers an agency invoice does not give you.
Every File Format Your Teams Actually Send
Word, XLIFF, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, PNG, JPG, SRT, VTT and more, all processed in the same workspace and exported back in their original format — so a format nobody planned for does not stop the job.
Multiple AI Engines, With Your Own Memory on Top
Smartcat routes content through several leading AI translation engines rather than betting the workflow on one, then applies your translation memory and glossary over the result. Text already in your memory is not charged again, so cost per translated word falls as the memory grows, and terminology decisions you approved once are enforced everywhere.
Procurement and Rollout Questions
What does a translation management system cost?
Most TMS vendors will not say, which is why comparing them is hard. Smartcat’s paid plans start at $1,200/year (Adapt) and scale to enterprise tiers.
- Platform fee — covers the system itself, and it is predictable from day one.
- Smartwords — translation itself is metered in usage credits based on word count, with text already in your translation memory not charged again.
- Cost per translated word falls as your memory grows.
- 15-day free trial — 15,000 Smartwords and full access to translation capabilities, no credit card.
Full breakdown on the pricing page.
Can we bring our existing translation memories and glossaries with us?
Yes. Import translation memories as .tmx and termbases as .tbx — the interchange formats every major TMS and CAT tool exports — plus bilingual .xliff.
Ask your current provider or agency for an export before you start; a memory you already own is leverage on your first project instead of a cold start. The same formats come back out if you ever leave, so the linguistic assets you build stay yours and stay portable.
How do we control who sees what once the whole company is in here?
Access is governed by preset roles with defined rights, so a reviewer sees the projects assigned to them and nothing else, and workspaces can be kept separate for different departments, brands, or clients. Roles can be changed as the team grows without rebuilding projects.
Smartcat is SOC 2 Type II compliant, data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and SSO through Azure AD, Okta and ADFS is available on enterprise tiers — details on the security page.
Do we still need our translation agency?
Sometimes yes, and it depends what you use them for.
- If the agency is doing the translating — Smartcat’s Marketplace gives you the same linguists, often literally the same people, inside your own system, with your memory and your terminology, and you see the per-word rate.
- If the agency is doing project management, in-country marketing judgment, or taking on liability for regulated content — that is a real service and a platform does not replace it.
The change most teams make is keeping the agency for the hard content and moving the volume in-house.
Where does Smartcat fall short?
Two things.
- It is cloud-only — if your security posture requires an on-premise or single-tenant private deployment, that is a genuine constraint and you should raise it in the first call rather than the last.
- If you only need an editor, you do not need a TMS. A freelancer or a two-person team translating a handful of documents a month will get more value from the CAT tool alone than from workflow, vendor management and reporting they will not use.
A TMS earns its cost when the coordination is the expensive part, not the translating.
Question not answered here? Book a demo — a 1:1 consultation with someone who has run these rollouts, no commitment and no form queue.