Translations should outlive the CMS that held them
Technology
Smartling is a translation management system with two ways into a site. A connector pulls strings out of the CMS, routes them through workflow and translation memory, and writes them back. The Global Delivery Network takes the other route, sitting in front of the site as a proxy and translating pages on the way to the reader.
The proxy is the option people underrate, because it does not care what renders the page. On BigCommerce the existing Global Delivery Network stayed in place while we moved tens of thousands of pages off Craft CMS and WordPress into Contentful, so years of approved translations came through the migration intact.
Localization
Where a translation layer belongs in the stack
- Translation memory is the asset
Years of reviewed translations are the expensive thing, not the software wrapped around them. Memory is what makes the next thousand strings cheap and keeps the same term rendering the same way sitewide. Choosing a translation platform is mostly choosing where that memory lives and how it gets out.
- The proxy survives a replatform
A delivery network sits in front of the site, so replacing the front end or the content model does not invalidate it. That is what happened on BigCommerce: localization carried on through a phased CMS migration, which preserved existing translations and held cost down at the point it usually spikes.
- A proxy is a layer you do not control
Every localized page then travels through infrastructure that is not yours. One more hop of latency, one more dependency in the critical path, and translated markup you cannot fix in your own repository. Connector based translation avoids all three, at the cost of coupling to the CMS.
