Once you have a sad smiley next to the connection's name, good news is that you can make it happy by automating the connection. Click on the Automate button to start the process.


The onboarding process has three steps:

  • Establishing your automated vendor portal or translation management system connection
  • Establishing your automated business management system connection (only when you configure your first connection)
  • Mapping the values between the vendor portal and the business management system


Once this is completed, you can start using the automated connections. Projects will appear in the Approvals pending area.


For a detailed list of steps, please see each integration's description in the knowledge base.


There are a couple of considerations though that are quite common:

  • to create a connection to a business management system, we need to use the system's APIs. Make sure that you have access to the APIs in your license. If you have a difficulty obtaining these, contact us and we'll help you.
  • you are likely to need administrator access to the business management systems. Even if you are not an administrator yourself, please have such a person handy when you are doing the automation.
  • some vendor portals might need an API key. These are for free, but you need to ask for them.
  • you will need to map the values between systems. This means that you have to find the corresponding values in your business management system for the values coming from the vendor portals, such as:
    • customers (e.g. you need to select a customer in the business management system for each connection, or provide a breakdown per office, end customer, etc.)
    • project managers (you can assign different project managers for different types of projects)
    • languages and language codes (e.g. some companies may have a "Spanish (International)" language, whereas others don't)
    • specializations or areas of expertise (e.g. what is a "clinical trial" text for you may very well be a "medical" or a "pharmaceutical" text for another provider)
    • services (e.g. if a customer is asking for "translation-editing-proofreading (TEP)", the workflow you may choose in your business management system may be called equally, or may be just "TEP", or depending on the tool, whether it's SDL Trados or memoQ server, may be "Trados TEP" and "memoQ TEP" - in the choice of services, you define a default and then exceptions based on project-specific information)
    • match rates or sliding scales. This is a bit more complicated. All translation management systems provide analysis/statistics about translation memory matching, however, the categories are not always the same. Ultimately the price is always calculated as the sum of weight x words per category multiplied by the word price, but some business management systems don't support all the tables of all the translation management systems, and you need to map certain categories (matching brackets) to the categories in your system. For example, Across provides 90-99%, 80-89%, etc. matches, whereas most systems work with 85-94%, 95-99%. If your BMS only supports the latter, you need to map the Across rates to the right rates in your system - i.e. where the weights are what you want to charge for the Across category.


For more information please see each integration's description in the knowledge base.


Service selection:

While most mapping is very straightforward and you just have to follow the on-screen instructions, service selection may not be so trivial. Most translation companies work with a limited set of services, which include translation only, translation-editing-proofreading, translation and editing, and machine translation post-editing. In the business management systems these are represented with some workflows. However, you may not have a specific workflow for each service, or workflows may be the same (e.g. whether something is translation or transcreation does not change how the content moves between the actors in the workflow, and they both need the same number of people in the same order), or sometimes the service may be the same but the workflow not, for example when you have to translate a PDF file, there may be a preparatory DTP step. To accommodate this flexibility, services in BeLazy are mapped as follows:

  • you first have to select a standard service,
  • then you can decide on the exceptions. You decide first about the set of conditions, and then about which service to use.

The conditions you can choose from depends on what information the vendor portal transmits. For example, not every portal gives you information about the translation tool. You can combine the conditions as necessary using the AND operator.

One interesting option is how you can manage dates. For example, you can set up a rule to say "select this service if deadline is within 2 days 6 hours". To do this, enter the date or time as follows:

  • 1h 30m - means one hour, thirty minutes
  • 1d - means one day
  • 30s - means thirty seconds
  • 1d 12h - means one day, twelve hours

Once the conditions are selected, you can select which workflow to assign to the service.