In our documentation, you'll find abbreviations for ease of reading. Here you'll find the meaning and a brief explanation of each term within the structure.
You'll also find industry terms that may vary among colleagues and companies, which we try to standardize to facilitate communication.
BeLazy concepts
Business management system (BMS): Your BMS serves as the central hub for tracking translation work. You can assign work to linguists and monitor project progress within this system. One BeLazy organization can only have one business management system connected. You can see its details under the profile menu / Manage my business management system in the user interface. It is not a requirement to work with a BMS to use BeLazy.
Vendor portal (VP): A vendor portal serves as the source of work, offering translation projects to translation companies and linguists. BeLazy facilitates the transfer of these offered projects to your BMS. Examples of VP include: Plunet Vendor Portal, XTRF Vendor Portal, Junction, Symfonie, LCX.
Translation management system (TMS): A translation management system is another type of source of work, a system that handles the actual translation of the content. The TMS, in comparison with VPs, often does not track any financial data or does not provide end customer information. Examples of TMS include: memoQ, Crowdin, XTM, Phrase, Lokalise, Transifex.
Workspace: A workspace is also a connection, however, the source is not a VP or TMS, but rather BeLazy's own API. You can easily connect BeLazy with external tools or email parsers via a third party app such as Make.com, use the Email Assistant to convert emails into workspace opportunities, or build your own programmatic automation such as a vendor portal based on this functionality.
Connection: A connection is a connection to a source system. It is usually described by a name, a URL, a user name and a password. The three connection types are VP, TMS and workspace.
Opportunity: An opportunity represents a work item offered to the organization through a connection. You can choose to accept or reject an opportunity. BeLazy requires acceptance to initiate the transfer of the opportunity to your BMS. Each opportunity appears as one line in the Approvals pending list on the user interface.
Project (or BeLazy project): Once an opportunity is accepted, and BeLazy performs the necessary operations to allow creating it in your BMS, it becomes a project and it is created in your BMS. The project reflects the work item as tracked in your BMS. Each project appears as one line in the Deliveries pending list on the user interface. Closed or delivered projects are shown in the Delivered within list, or the project list under the Connection card. One opportunity becomes one BeLazy project.
BMS project: By default, every BeLazy project is turned into one BMS project. However, BeLazy's bundling functionality can be used to merge multiple BeLazy projects into one BMS project, for example merging workflow steps, different languages of the same project, different files of the same project into one project, or creating a daily or a monthly project. One BMS project can contain multiple BeLazy projects, but each BeLazy project belongs to one BMS project.
Red flag: A red flag is an exception for an automated connection: the automation found a new value (e.g. a new service is requested from you and the system does not know which BMS service to use for this) or ran into some difficulty (e.g. your user name and password don't work, or the other system is down). Red flags need to be resolved through the appropriate actions.
Onboarding: Onboarding is preparing a connection for automation by enabling automated access to both the source and target systems, and by mapping the information coming from the source system to the information that the target system expects.
Automated connection: A connection that went through onboarding and is able to create projects in the target system with or without the click of a button, unless something unexpected happens.
Industry concepts
Freelance translator: A translator who works independently for multiple LSPs or directly for translation buyers.
In-house translator: A translator who is employed by an LSP or a translation buyer.
LSP (language service provider): In other words, a translation company. LSPs can be MLVs or SLVs.
MLV (multilingual vendor): Generally an LSP that serves directly the translation buyers, and helps them manage their multilingual content in many languages. MLVs are often technology- and customer process-savvy, that's the value they add for the translation buyer. Because of the number of languages they handle, MLVs usually have a much bigger revenue than SLVs. MLVs outsource work to SLVs, freelance translators and sometimes have in-house translators.
SLV (single language vendor): Well, not really single language... at least two languages are involved! These are usually smaller LSPs that only service certain language pairs, but they do those right. One variation is the RLV (regional language vendor) which services not only one language like Dutch, but all the Balkan languages, all the Nordic languages, all the Baltic languages, all the South-East-Asian languages, etc. SLVs don't often work directly for translation buyers, however, some technology-savvy buyers prefer to work with them. Please note that the terms MLV and SLV are not completely clear. An SLV that provides e.g. Croatian for Apple through an MLV may also provide services to direct clients in Croatia.
Translation or localization buyer: Often also referred to as enterprise, these are companies that order translation for their own marketing, compliance, support, contracting, etc. reasons - to facilitate their international expansion or operations. The content comes to them either from other people (shared services approach), or from computer-operated systems (integrations). They decide what to translate, into what languages, if they produce computer software code like most companies do today, they are responsible for internationalization, etc. Most of the time they drive the agenda of continuous localization.
Automator: Any company or person that wants to automate the receipt, delivery and processing of jobs.
Additional concepts
Application programming interface (API): In computer software, most of the things you want to achieve you achieve through clicks in the graphical user interface. Using APIs, computers can automate the performance of certain tasks in other systems programmatically. For example, your own business management system can request project information from BeLazy and create it there, or can directly push projects into BeLazy.
Agile localization: Agile localization means localizing software strings and other things as part of the agile software development process, in foreseeable sprints (rather than starting it just whenever somebody requests it), with a view to continuous improvement.
Continuous localization: Continuous localization is a technology-powered process that provides a high degree of automation in the localization of small batches of content with regular updates. It can relate to any area, not just software development (e.g. websites), but it also involves continuous improvement.