Translation and Content Management vendor SDL has taken a minority stake in privately held Trisoft N.V., a Belgian-based vendor of InfoShare, a component content management system (CCM). There was no fanfare, and in fact no announcement; evidently because it wasn't a full acquisition, the two companies dispensed with any press release. However, I think it's a significant move. When it comes to translation information management, XML; and in this case DITA-based XML, can matter. SDL had previously acquired Tridion, a Web CMS that can be used for component content management, early last year.

Content components facilitate translation through content reuse (write once, use many; translate once, use many), decreased cost of preparing translated content for multichannel publishing, and improved cross-channel translation (content is no longer siloed based on format such as HTML, Quark, etc.). DITA provides additional support for translation not found in traditional XML. However, with the translation of components rather than full documents, there does come an increase in the complexity of translation management as there are many more "chunks" to manage.

This is just an investment, not an acquisition, and I expect SDL will continue supporting its partnerships with Astoria, Vasont, and XyEnterprise. But I think that SDL's investment (along with EMC's X-Hive acquisition last August) signals greater attention to component content management and XML among larger vendors.