How do websites get their content localized quickly? Find out how a CMS aids in the automation of the localization process.
What does CMS mean? And how is it related to localization?
CMS stands for Content Management System. And as the name indicates, it is a system to manage your content. I think this actually extends beyond websites. But, I think with websites, it’s going to be the best explanation that I can give you right now.
Maybe, you know, maybe you don’t know but websites are actually made of HTML files, which have certain code, certain syntax, how you need to create the document, how you need to use the tags to make it look in a specific way. And, not everybody in this world knows how to do it. But, most of the people in this world know how to use something like Word.
So, CMS transfers this whole ability to create websites to something that is usable, kind of like Word. And actually, we have something called WordPress, which is the most popular CMS for website content. And, what WordPress allows you to do, it’s simply a web application with a platform where you can easily log in, you have some menu, you can add a post and you have very simple fields, where you just write the title. And then, you have a paragraph where you write the text and it looks almost exactly as you are using Word or Google documents. And then with a press of a button, you can just publish this new post, and tada, suddenly, it’s all live on the website.
And if we didn’t have a CMS, then a lot of the content that’s created these days, because it’s so easy to create and publish the content on websites, wouldn’t be created if people had to actually learn the HTML and CSS and JavaScript and all these other things. So, CMS makes it easier to create web content, to manage it, to update it, to publish it, to delete it. There are multiple roles that can also contribute to the content creation process. Everything gets stored. If somebody does any change, it’s also logged automatically. Question is, how is this all related to localization?
So localization, what we do is we take the source content, and we want to localize it into multiple different languages, right? And so, now we know that the content instead of being simply in HTML files, most of the time actually is entered into CMS systems like WordPress. And then, what we’re trying to do with localization is we’re trying to tap into the content. So as the content creators, let’s say, use WordPress and add new things, we want to extract the new content, ideally automatically, whenever we notice that there’s a new post, order something updated, and send it into localization. And localization, ideally, probably you want to have TMS. I think I already made another video about that. So, what you want to do is you wanna have a connection between a CMS system and a TMS system. So then, whenever someone creates new content, it gets automatically sent to the TMS where it can be translated and localized into multiple different languages. And then, sent back to WordPress, where it would be available to the people in different countries in their own language. That’s it about CMS.
