Specialists need context. Colleagues need translations. You’re the one connecting both, while the work lives across drives, planners and spreadsheets. A multilingual content system brings it all together, so the work starts explaining itself instead of waiting for you.
A real customer profile, not an illustration
Choose what each job deserves
Product descriptions, autumn range
12,400 words · 6 languages
Safety notice, DE market
340 words · DE
Launch campaign copy
2,100 words · FR, ES, IT
UI strings, release 4.2
1,100 words · 6 languages
The reason the queue forms
Three questions arrive on an average Tuesday. None is difficult. All three come to you because you are the only place they can be answered.
Marketing is asking, reasonably, and you cannot answer without opening two systems and a folder. Neither can they, which is why they asked.
Your Italian freelancer needs thirty seconds of context to get it right. The answer exists. It is in an email from March, from an engineer who has since changed teams.
Finance is asking before the budget round. Nothing is wrong with the question. It just takes you two days, because the numbers live in five places and one of them is your memory.
Where are we with the German?
VisibleProgress by file, language and person
What do we call this in German?
ConsistentApproved terminology, visible while they work
What is localization costing us per market?
AnswerableReporting by market, content type and time
Give the work one address. Most questions stop being yours.
None of this is a translation problem. It is an addressing problem — and it is why a discipline that nobody has time to learn ends up depending on one person who has to explain it all day.
One morning, five decisions
This is the part of the job that is genuinely yours, and the part nobody sees. Choosing what a piece of content deserves — whose eyes, at what stage — is judgment built from years of knowing your product and your markets.
Twelve thousand words into six languages is seventy-four thousand words of catalogue copy. Most of it comes out of memory from the spring range.
Decide what quality tier does not get individual review.
Organized, in one system
Centralization is not the benefit. Visibility is. Work scattered across a drive, an inbox and five freelancers' desktops cannot be seen by anyone (including you) which is exactly why every question has to be routed through a person. Give the work one address and most of those questions answer themselves.
Where are we with this language? | — Progress per file, per language and per person, on the project. |
What do we call this in German? Asked by your freelancer, mid-job | — Approved terminology, enforced on AI, visible while they work. |
Why is it phrased this way? | — Language data: segments, states and the comments around them. |
What did we already agree? Asked by everyone, eventually | — Translation memory, applied before anyone starts translation, including AI. |
The trade
Stops needing you
— Status. Anyone with access can see where a language stands without sending you a message.
— Context. Instructions, reference files and approved terms travel with the job instead of living in your sent folder.
— Counting. Volume analysis runs on the project rather than in a spreadsheet you maintain.
— File repair. Tag and placeholder protection is built in, so what comes back opens.
Back in your hands
— Terminology, without asking anyone. Add, change, bulk-clean, hunt duplicates, check a term across every language you run.
— What gets translated. Filters decide which parts of an XML or JSON file are in scope. You set that, not a ticket.
— Your history, imported. Bring existing translation memories and termbases with you. TMX and TBX in, TMX and TBX out.
— Who works on what. Assign the reviewer or translator who knows the product, per language, per package.
The administrative half done by the system. The judgment half handed back, with a record attached.
Twenty freelancers and twenty-five colleagues
A correction made outside the system is a correction you will pay for again, because it never reaches the memory. So the question of who gets access should never be a budget conversation — and on the plan built for this profile, it isn't.
Your bench
— Bring your own translators and agencies and keep working with the people you already trust, at the rates you already agreed.
— Order from our linguists in the same screen when a language pair has nobody on it.
— Assign per language and per package, so nobody is handed more than they need.
— Everything they confirm lands in your language data, not in a reply-all.
No tax on adding people
— The plan built for this profile carries unlimited users.
— Twenty freelancers and twenty-five colleagues cost the same as a handful of each.
— Nobody stays outside the system because a seat is expensive.
— Outside the system, nothing they decide is kept.
The freelancer who has translated your manuals since 2019 knows things no memory contains. Losing her to a migration is a real cost that never appears in the business case.
The part that ends the argument
Nobody outside your team has ever been moved by a fuzzy match rate. The people who decide your budget talk about markets, revenue and time to launch, and the useful move is to answer in those terms. Reporting runs on Power BI: you tell us what you need to be able to show, and that report gets built for you.
What did this quarter cost us, by market? (Next to what those markets returned)
Where did spend go up without launch dates moving with it? (Against your own approved history)
Which markets or content types keep needing expensive human review? (Per language pair)
What would we stop translating if we could see the return clearly? (By content type)
Framed as questions on purpose. The reporting is built to order, so promising specific dashboards would be a claim we can't keep.
Where the boundary sits
Worth being precise about, because "you'll never need anyone again" is the promise every platform makes and none of them keeps.
Terminology in every direction. File filters and what is in scope. Assigning people. Importing your memories. Creating and routing projects. Reviewing, approving, and seeing who did what. Anything that is a judgment about your language is a judgment you make, in the interface, without a ticket.
Reporting. Gated quality features. Automatic routing by content type. Connections into your CMS, PIM or repository. Reuse your language data for content creation. This is engineering, and pretending otherwise would only mean you found out later.
The second column is the one that has grown. It is cheap to start, and the bill arrives later — worth having in writing before the meeting rather than after it.
| Classic TMS | Build it in-house | TextUnited | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting everyone inside | A seat, and a conversation about whether they need one | You build the access layer too | Unlimited users on the plan built for this |
| Changing terminology | Often an admin or engineer task | Whatever you built, if you built it | You, in the interface or by prompt |
| Bringing your own vendors | Usually yes | Yes | Yes, at their own rates |
| What is translatable in a file | Filter set up for you | You write and maintain the parser | You choose it yourself |
| Internal and external work | Separate processes | Not usually built | One screen, per job |
| Reporting | Fixed dashboards and CSV export | You build it and keep building it | You describe it, we build it |
| When requirements change | Change request, next release | The last stretch is where the cost lives | Platform work we do with you |
| Your language data if you leave | Usually exportable | Yours | Yours, TMX and TBX out |
Questions
Bring translation memories and termbases as TMX and TBX. From there, files, versions, comments, terminology, people and progress have one address.
Yes. Add existing freelancers and vendors at the rates already agreed, or order from TextUnited linguists in the same project.
No. Add terms, change them, bulk-clean, find duplicates and check consistency yourself, in the interface or through a connected AI assistant.
The plan built for this profile carries unlimited users, so twenty freelancers and twenty-five colleagues cost the same as a handful.
Yes. Progress per file, per language and per person sits on the project.
Yes. File filters decide which parts of XML, JSON or IDML are in scope.
Reporting runs on Power BI. Tell us what you need to show and that report gets built for you.
The expensive distance is between a file translator and a system the whole company can work inside. TextUnited is API-first, so engineers can build on top of it.
Yes. Translation history keeps segment translations, states and comments attached to them.
It belongs to your organisation and exports in standard formats.
Begin with a free trial on your own content, then set up terminology and workflows with the team.
Start with real work
Not a demo dataset. The five things that actually landed on your desk this morning, through the screen you would use every day, with your own terminology underneath them.
