If you are setting up a database publishing workflow, chances are that some type of translation needs to take place in it. A lot of options exist to incorporate this into your database publishing solution.
Linking to the masters
For starters, you will check if you can link your translation workflow with existing tools. Translation software like Trados make it their business to be good at translations. So an incorporation of their functionalities into the database publishing workflow is always a good thing.
Let the experts do the work
If you don't have translation software, you might be a bit weary of hiring translation services for all your database publishing projects. So why not see if you have a taskforce handy to do the translations for you. An international dealer channel might be very suited for this. If you can provide a simple interface on top of the content that needs to be translated, they might be convinced to do the translations as a part of the database publishing workflow. After all, the catalog will help their local business as well.
Product-based translations / PIMS
This type of interface can be based on a number of (not mutually exclusive) designs. First of all, you might start of with the product information which is the basis of your database publishing project. Agents (or professional translators) can translate the information in this product database as needed.
Term-based translations
Even if you start with a product database, you might use a term dictionary (what we call strings) as the basis of your translations. These strings can be assigned as properties to the products, and translated in a separate database. A large advantage is that a lot of products will share the same information. So translating a single product will result in a lot of the rest of the products to be partially finished as well. This way, the translation time in your database publishing workflow could be significantly reduced.
Document-based translations
In cases where the output is not very structured (or based on product information), you might launch each translation workflow based on the documents that are being created in the web-to-print or database publishing application. After finishing the design of the master language, you could assing copies of this document to the appropriate people. They could do the translations either in the document itself (maybe even online, thanks to InDesign Server) or in an export of its content in XML or other formats.
The powers of InDesign Server
InDesign Server can come in very handy in this regard for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it can be used to allow translations straight into the document. But no local license (or know how) of InDesign is required for this. The user is presented with an easy web interface. All translations are inserted into the InDesign Document by InDesign Server, and the result is visualized to the user again. Meaning that small corrections in text length are much easier implemented. Similarly, InDesign Templates can be used to visualize the effects of the translation of product information. Texts in overflow can easily be detected this way. And all of this can be done with the standard InDesign Server features such as language dictionaries, text wraps and hyphenation libraries.
Status tracking
And regardless of the option(s) you use, online translations in a database publishing project have the very important advantage that you can include status tracking. Being able to get an overview of the remaining work (and the current bottlenecks) are obviously very nice benefits.