The Rosetta Foundation’s Localisation and Translation Platform Development

There is an ever-increasing demand for localisation and translation services, especially in so-called emerging market, in economically less developed regions and societies, and into and out of languages currently not present in the digital world. Organisations such as Translators without Borders that service these demands require access to the appropriate technology to automate the relevant processes and the translation itself.

The Rosetta Foundation develops and deploys such a platform. It uses Globalsight and Crowdsight as its backbone. Both systems are open source systems originally developed by Transware and then moved into the open source space by their new owners Welocalize in early 2009. Sponsored by Welocalize, Globalsight is an open-source Translation Management System (TMS) that helps automate the critical tasks associated with the creation, translation, review, storage and management of global content. CrowdSight is another open-source application fully integrated with GlobalSight. It is used specifically to engage the right “crowd,” group or community to deliver quick-turn translation for on-demand content. The existing GlobalSight community has 1,500 members.

The Rosetta Foundation aims to establish a funded core development group that will, together with volunteer programmers in the open source community and researchers in the LRC and CNGL, over time develop an automated platform for localisation and translation that will go beyond translation management systems as they exist today. It will develop and maintain  a platform for the integration of component technologies that will include machine translation and translation memory systems, terminology databases, postediting and quality assurance systems, as well as decision support and process control components.