The Forrester Wave™: Translation Management Systems, Q3 2025, our inaugural evaluation of this market, is live!

Localization in 2025 is about delivering personalized, context-aware experiences at every touchpoint. It’s more outcome-oriented than ever, aimed at helping businesses thrive in multilingual, multicultural global markets. As localization becomes a standard buyer expectation and more applications offer translation as a feature, organizations face complex choices. How can they balance automation with quality, scale with consistency, and innovation with governance? Translation management systems (TMSes) enable organizations to meet the challenge.

Forrester defines TMSes as enterprise platforms that help organizations design, orchestrate, govern, and scale localization across all functions and business systems. Our evaluation covered 12 vendors: Bureau Works, Centific, LILT, Lionbridge, Lokalise, memoQ, Phrase, RWS, Smartling, TransPerfect, Unbabel, and XTM. TransPerfect’s acquisition of Unbabel just before publication underscores the dynamic nature of this market, but we evaluated the two vendors separately.

We assessed each vendor on three inputs: a detailed questionnaire, executive strategy briefings and demos, and interviews of up to three reference customers. With 19 criteria for current offering and seven for strategy, this report illuminates the capabilities and differentiators that matter most.

Key Takeaways For Decision-Makers

TMSes integrate localization into enterprise workflows and business applications, along with quality tools, data security, automation, AI agents, vendor and cost management, and reporting. In addition, they provide access to a range of machine translation (MT) engines, large language models (LLMs), and human translation (HT) options. We see the TMS market at an inflection point, and organizations must modernize their infrastructure to navigate this transition. Remember that:

  • AI reshapes localization workflows, not just translations. Translations rely on a mix of MT, LLMs, and HT, often a different blend for each touchpoint and language pair. But the real uplift comes from workflow automation and agents, and TMS providers are not at all standardized in this respect. They offer a wide array of AI tools and agents to automate tasks and source content optimization, as well as provide vendor and tool selection, content adaptation, post-editing, file management, and more.
  • Integration — the backbone of modern TMS platforms — creates stickiness. TMS platforms get their power by connecting dozens of internal tools, such as content management systems, digital asset management systems, privileged identity management solutions, and development environments, with external AI providers, MT engines, integration platforms as a service, and marketplaces. They provide or integrate with specialized capabilities like audiovisual localization, transcreation, and adaptation. This level of integration requires robust IT support and a sophisticated approach to solution architecture. While many reference customers were delighted with their TMSes, a substantial fraction wanted to change providers but were held back by their investment in integration and customization.
  • Governance and decentralization must work in tandem — and require human oversight. A “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for needs as different as software, legal, marketing, finance, and employee communication. Effective TMSes remove bottlenecks from decentralized execution — but setting standards, optimizing workflows, and monitoring performance all requires human oversight. Complex organizations need a skilled localization leader to guide strategy and operations.

The Evolution Of The TMS Market

The TMS market has come a long way since its origins as homegrown localization service provider tools. Early platforms focused on workflow management and computer-aided translation. Now, modern TMSes are thriving as vendor-neutral orchestration layers that unify fragmented technologies and functions into a cohesive ecosystem. Vendors and market intelligence firms are introducing new terms to reflect the expanded remit, from “language technology platforms” to “localization automation platforms.” The core need for robust, scalable technology and services to help enterprises remains the same, however.

What Comes Next?

For a deeper look into the market, Forrester clients can read the full report. They can also read the preceding landscape report for an overview of market trends, use cases, and functionality. We encourage readers not to dismiss any vendor without first examining the detailed descriptions of strategy, capabilities, and client feedback in our Wave evaluation. Clients can generate custom shortlists and scores for vendor fit, calculated based on the criteria they select as important, or download the accompanying Excel file for a full breakdown of the questions, scoring, and criteria grading.

If you have questions about the changes happening in the TMS market, schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me.