Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a provider of Web content management software for marketing and a wholly owned subsidiary of J.L. Halsey, introduced a multilingual content management plug-in that automates the process of translating and publishing Web site content into multiple languages.

Connexion Corporate Communications s.a., a Belgium business-to-business multilingual communications agency and ntegrator of Web content management software in Europe, independently developed the multilingual content management module and is making the module available to all Hot Banana channel partners and clients.

From the Hot Banana interface, site publishers can now send Web pages, portions of Web pages, and even entire Web sites to an XML-compatible translation memory system (TMS), such as DejaVu, Trados, or SDLX. Once human translators have edited the content in their TMS of choice, their translation work is sent back to Hot Banana’s Web CMS for publication in just a few clicks. The translated content, navigation, metadata, pictures, and links appear in the same layout as the original pages, which the Hot Banana user can then choose to further validate, get approvals, or instantly publish.

“As a business-to-business multilingual communications agency that services some of Europe’s largest corporations, we needed a more cost-effective and time-efficient way to translate content into several languages using a Web CMS,” said Stany van Gelder, marketing director, Connexion. “Hot Banana’s Unicode compliance, search-engine friendly platform, and ease-of-use made building an add-on translation module to help automate the translation process the obvious and easiest choice. We’re pleased that other Hot Banana partners and clients can now deliver multilingual Web content faster and at reduced costs simply by using our module.”

The new multilingual translation module works with any Hot Banana implementation. Connexion Corporate Communications licenses the module direct.

“We strategically built Hot Banana as an open platform to allow partners to add modules easily,” said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana Software Inc. “With the launch of this add-on, Connexion went beyond customization to monetization. We’re eager to see other channel partners follow their lead, and develop and resell their own innovative add-ons to Hot Banana that might reflect the niche or sector that they specialize in.”