SDL International, one of the world's leading Internet product and globalization service companies, today announced a new version of its computer-aided translation tool SDLX. This upgrade includes major enhancements to facilitate rapid, cost-effective translation of web site content.

 Version 3.1 of the SDLX Translation Memory suite offers a concise, user-friendly interface for translators and now supports native HTML, XML, SGML and server-side scripting documents, empowering the next generation of web-aware translation personnel. The product integrates with the web-based multilingual content management solution SDLWebFlow, which provides a streamlined and structured method of developing and maintaining global e-commerce sites.

SDLX 3.1 is already the translation suite used by a wide variety of companies including Autodesk, the BBC and EIDOS, publishers of Tomb Raider. SDLX supports the industry standard Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) format, making files portable between Translation Memory products. SDLX also supports OpenTag, the emerging standard for extracting text for localization. OpenTag is a single common mark-up format that can encode text extracted from documents of varying and arbitrary formats.

"SDLX 3.1 marks a watershed in the translation memory tools marketplace," commented Mark Lancaster, CEO of SDL International. "In the current marketplace, translation personnel are just as likely to be working with web site content as they are any other media. By providing these web extensions to the core suite, SDL has ensured that the right collection of software tools is available for multilingual web site production."

The SDLX Translation Memory suite includes tools for alignment, translation (batch and interactive), analysis, maintenance and terminology maintenance. Existing translations can be aligned to create a Translation Memory using SDL Align. SDL Edit provides translation-oriented editing facilities and access to a preview of the translated file at any time. SDL Analyse provides statistical information on the number of repetitions and how suitable a project is for Translation Memory processing.

These and other elements of the suite combine to provide a total localization platform, reducing repetitive tasks and streamlining the globalization process for both on- and offline content. The SDLX product suite is standalone but is also designed to work with the multilingual content management product, SDLWebFlow, to allow clients to keep their multilingual web sites synchronized with the content of the host language web site. SDLWebFlow detects changes on the original site and implements a web-based workflow to enable rapid, managed and cost-effective updates.