From 1997 to 2005 it was called Ambassador Suite and was developed and owned by GlobalSight Corp. that according to Red Herring magazine was one of the "ten companies to watch" in 1999. In 2005, Transware Inc. acquired it and continued its development. In May 2008, Welocalize acquired Transware and GlobalSight. In January 2009 after replacing the proprietary technology used in the product with open source components Welocalize released version 7.1.
Steering committee
The Steering committee formed by representatives of the main companies currently involved in the project are listed here.
In December 2008 there were four Language Service Providers involved in the project: Afghan Translation Service, Applied Language Solutions, Lloyd International Translations and VistaTEC.
Features
According to the Translator and Reviewer Training Guide and the GlobalSight vs WorldServer, the software has the following features:
Customized workflows, created and edited using graphical workflow editor
Support for both human translation and fully integrated machine translation
Automation of many traditionally manual steps in the localization process, including: filtering and segmentation, TM leveraging, analysis, costing, file handoffs, email notifications, TM update, target file generation
Translation Memory management and leveraging, including multilingual TMs, and the ability to leverage from multiple TMs
In Context Exact matching, as well as exact and fuzzy matching
Alignment mechanism for generating Translation memory from previously translated documents
Reporting
Web services API for programmatic access to GlobalSight functionality and data
Integrated with Omniscien Technologies Language Studio APIs for automated translation
Although a plugin called Crowdsight intended to extend the functionality and support crowdsourcing, GlobalSight was found not suitable to support crowdsourcing processes that depend on redundant inputs.
Integration with other platforms
In 2011, Globalme Language & Technology released an open source plugin which connects the back end of a Drupal or Wordpress website to GlobalSight. Publishers can send their content directly to GlobalSight using this CMS plugin. Drupal CMS In 2014 Globalme and Welocalize published an open source Drupal plugin to provide integration capabilities with the Drupal TMGMT translation management plugin.
