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TinyTM is open-source software and developed by an open-source community and (currently) licensed under GPL V2.

• Integrate TinyTM with commercial applications:
  We encourage commercial vendors to integrate TinyTM into their applications. We will design the TinyTM infrastructure in order to make integration as easy as possible and to avoid any "contamination" of closed-source code with the GPL.
   
  
• Build commercial extensions
  The open-source community usually isn’t very good at producing user-friendly application GUIs. So we would encourage commercial vendors to build extensions around the protocol.>
   
  

 

Objectives

 

Long-term objectives

• Provide translation agencies, freelance translators and other translation organizations with free and standardized translation memory tools.
  
• Provide translation organizations with innovative translation workflow applications
  
• Spread the use of TMs and workflows to new areas such as content management and helpdesk applications

Many "mature" IT markets are today dominated by open-source product including web browsers (Apache), application servers (JBoss), content management (Typo3, Plone and Drupal), Databases (mySQL) etc.

We believe that the market for translation memories is ready for such a development approach. Recent consolidation in this field further suggests a community approach.

 

Who is behind TinyTM?

Who is behind TinyTM?

TinyTM has been initiated by Frank Bergmann from ]project-open[. The project has been inspired by FOLT and its TMOSS project (please see Frank's paper on FOLT) and in particular by a conversations with Manuel Hanen from Hexx during Tekom Spring 2008 in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Relationship with ]project-open[

Organizational relationship

It is correct that the founder of TinyTM is also the founder of ]project-open[. However, TinyTM has been designed as a completely independent open-source project. We expect that TinyTM will develop its own dynamics with its own contributors and community structure. FOLT or a similar organization would probably the best option to provide an organizational framework for TinyTM. (Please contact Frank if you think that your organization would provide a suitable framework).

We hope that the experience of the ]project-open[ team (~500 installations in the translation sector) will provide TinyTM with the credibility that it needs in order to attract industry support and a powerful community. However, Frank will hand over TinyTM leadership to an elected body such as FOLT as soon as this option becomes viable.

Technical relationship

The TinyTM data model has been designed for easy integration with authoring, content management and translation management applications. A first such integration exists between TinyTM and ]project-open[ (]project-open[ TinyTM Integration).

However, it is important to see this integration as a starting point and proof of concept, and not as an exclusive relationship. The TinyTM licensing has been designed to encourage the integration even with closed-source applications, so we expect more integrations to appear with time.

 

Basic Architecture

TinyTM Architecture

TinyTM consists of:

• A "Translation Client"
  
• A "TM-Server"
  
• A "Protocol" that connects the translation environment with the TM-server

We envision a variety of Clients and Servers to emerge that will work with each other via the Protocol.
A closed-source Client may work with an open-source Server, and vice versa. We envision a independent body to certify interoperability and to grant a "TinyTM compliant" certification.

 

 

Requirements

The following functional requirements guide the development of TinyTM:

• Basic TM Functionality
  TinyTM should allow translators to store and retrieve translated segments, according to industry best practices.
   
• Multiple Clients
  TinyTM should include (or be integrated with) a number of different translation clients. This is important because some translators heavily rely on MS-Word as a translation environment, while MS-Word is not open-source and not well suited to deal with XML and other types of structured documents.
   
• Fuzzy-Matching
  TinyTM should allow to find approximate matches and to allow user to specify their individual penalties for a wide range of parameters.
   
• Easy Import and Export
  TinyTM should support TMX and XLIFF for import and export.
   
• Open-Source
  TinyTM should be available at no cost to all interested parties. Parties should be able to freely modify TinyTM, create variants and publish variants under different names.
   
• Scalability
  TinyTM should be able to scale up to large organization’s TM sized. This requirement conflicts with simplicity and quick implementation requirements. Therefore TinyTM needs to provide a pluggable back-end architecture, so that we can add fuzzy indices and other technologies in order to accelerate retrieval performance.
   
• Easy to Understand
  As an open-source project we want to encourage as many people as possible to contribute. For this reason we should design the system so that it is easy to understand and extend, even for casual programmers.
   
• Easy Integration
  Allow for integration with other open-source and closed-source system in order to tap into their user’s communities. In particular we should encourage other TMs to support TinyTM as an (alternative) back end and to allow applications such as authoring, content management and project management to incorporate TinyTM as a component.
   
• Unicode Support
  TinyTM should support Unicode (UTF-8).
   
• Internet Security
  TinyTM should suited to run in a "hostile Internet environment".
   

 

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