When it comes to creating content and managing it, content management systems, CMS for short, have established themselves as the standard. One of the most-used and best-known CMS, next to Wordpress and Joomla!, is Drupal. Drupal is a free, open-source CMS that is mostly used by large companies and supports 94 languages. Many of these CMS, including Drupal, offer by default the ability to create content on the appropriate platform in different languages. Editors work directly in the CMS and translate the corresponding content from the source language into the target language (foreign language). Although this approach works, it is not optimal when it comes to localisation and translation. The process is error-prone and quite manual, as the source text is overwritten by the editors or translators and the target text is inserted. The translator has to "fight through" page by page and cannot use texts or sentences that have already been translated.
In order to optimise the translation process and save costs and time, Apostroph Group uses special translation management systems (TMS) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. The special feature of these CAT tools is that they use special databases in which all translated segments and customer-specific terminology are stored. This means that during the translation process, the translator is shown existing translations and does not have to translate the corresponding segments again, and is supported by the terminology database in order to use the correct terms in the target language.
In order for content to be edited with the aforementioned CAT tools and TMS, it must be exported from the CMS and re-imported after translation into the appropriate target language. Such export and import are in this case also quite manual and therefore suboptimal. A better approach would be to automate the individual steps in the whole process. And it is exactly this automation that Apostroph offers with the module developed especially for Drupal, also called "Connector". Thanks to the extensibility of Drupal and based on the TMGMT (Translation Management Tool) plugin system, we have developed a Connector that connects Drupal to our order system. The connection and communication between Drupal and our order system takes place via defined interfaces, the API (Application Programming Interface).
Before use, the Connector must be configured. The configuration includes the creation of the URL of our "Public API" and a username and password. The URL is used to inform the Connector with which service it has to communicate; a username and password ensure that the corresponding user can be identified at Apostroph. Thanks to this module, users do not have to leave Drupal and can manage their translation projects directly in Drupal. The individual pages to be translated can be collected in a "shopping cart" or transmitted individually directly to Apostroph at the "push of a button". Once the content to be translated has arrived at Apostroph, it is processed using the aforementioned tools and then made available to the Connector again. The entire process can be monitored by the end user directly in Drupal. In doing so, the Connector calls the appropriate endpoints of our API and shows the user the current status of the translation job in Drupal. Once the job has reached the status indicating that the job is complete, the translated content can be downloaded again at the "push of a button" and automatically imported into Drupal. Downloading can be further automated by configuring the Connector to periodically check the status autonomously and fetch and import completed translations.
