CCMS stands for component content management system. CMS is a content management system.
The difference between a CMS and CCMS is in the granularity. CMS works at the document level while CCMS works at the topic level.
Our experience shows that while CCMS greatly helps reusing paragraphs between various pieces of documentation, it has no effect on localization compared to a normal CMS. Computer-aided translation tools (translation memory) work at the sentence level thus there is no saving to expect when using a CCMS compared to a CMS because the translation memory’s granularity is already lower.
Concretely, Author-IT, for example, would tag an entire Topic as “to translate/update” if only one sentence changed. However, the translation exact/fuzzy matching mechanism of translation memory would go down at the sentence level and automatically translate sentences that didn’t change (no translation charge for perfect matches).
In short, in terms of localization, a CCMS must have the same functionality as a CMS. Ideally it should natively support multilinguality and not through third party plug-ins. For example, WPML is the most popular plug-in of WordPress, itself the most popular CMS at the moment, and it is far from ideal. Each time we work with WPML, we discover new issues due to the fact that the plug-in is a hack over a CMS that was not designed with localization in mind.
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If you need help deciding on a CCMS or CMS solution or if you have a system in place and need help localizing it contact us.