SharePoint Gains Translation Capabilities

Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and document management server has become a business phenomenon worth more than a billion dollars in sales, so increasingly companies have sprouted up to fill gaps with other products to provide services not found in the server.

One seemingly overlooked area for a document management system is that many companies that have deployed SharePoint are multinational.

For them, many types of communications need to be translated into multiple languages just to do daily business. It's expensive, time consuming, and error prone -- something that is not tolerable in international business.

Enter Lingotek Inside solution for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SharePoint, which the company is preparing to launch.

Lingotek's services are delivered under the aegis of what the translation company calls its Collaborative Translation Platform (CTP).

The platform is not just a software application for performing machine translation of documents, although those technologies are part of the technology at users' command.

In fact, there are different tiers of translation services that the customer can select from, all based on the CTP.

For translations of news clips, websites or other material that doesn't need an exact translation, Lingotek offers machine translation that uses any of several translation engines, including Microsoft's Bing translation engine as well as Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) engine, and others.

On the other end of the spectrum are documents like contracts, patient health information, bids, and legal filings that need to be literally letter perfect. For these Lingotek offers human language experts who will translate documents from scratch, or customers can contract for such translations themselves.

Sort of in the middle is the combination of members of the customer's "community" or "crowd," perhaps employees who speak more than one language -- that can be asked to review machine translations, for example. Often members of the customer's community group are also subject matter experts.

This can be done for documents, such as memos, that need to be of better quality than a machine translation but don't need the precision of a communiqué.

"The person can say, 'I want to translate this,' and they can have it machine translated , community translated, or translated from scratch," Calvin Scharffs, Lingotek's vice president of marketing and product development, told InternetNews.com.

Lingotek Inside for Microsoft SharePoint is the newest environment to be supported. It works by embedding a plug-in into SharePoint that enables the user to perform the steps in the translation and vetting process from within SharePoint.

Lingotek Inside for SharePoint is currently in beta testing and is slated to be released around the end of the year, Scharffs said.