Managing copy during interaction & visual design

Question

I'm about to begin a web architecture and design project that will have many pages with lots of content / copy across several different languages. One of the challenges is that for each geographical location / language there will be subtle variations in the products that are shown, the pages that are active and the features or modules of the page that are displayed.

While we are responsible to create the wireframes and design comps, the client is responsible for the creation of the copy. Because of this, the client has asked me if there is a tool, preferably web-based, that they can use to manage the copy page-by-page across the different languages. Because this will be built on an entirely new CMS system, the idea is to find a tool to store and manage the copy during the editing process ahead of dumping it into the final product (likely Drupal). They are also adamant about finding something that is not Word or Excel.

I'm sure many of you will think to say Google Docs (or similar cloud-based solution) and while that is a viable option we are considering, the question is, is there anything that you are aware of that has been developed specifically for this purpose?

Answer 1

Spreadsheets are useful up to a point but they are unmanageable for large amounts of rich content. I've been using GatherContent recently. I've not yet used it on a multi-language project but I imagine you could either create a site structure for each language version or include a field to collect each language on each page (e.g. each product page would have "English Description", "French Description" etc.)

Answer 2

The two multilingual content management services I've seen come up the most are SDL Tridion and Kentico.