Armed with $3 million, a lot of it from Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's personal account, a start-up called Cloudwords aims to push the gentle art of localization into the cloud. Well, the $20 billion business behind the gentle art of localization at any rate.

It's got a Translation Management Automation (TMA) platform and it claims this native cloud widgetry will do a cheaper, quicker job brokering materials to be translated to real live translators Cloudwords lines up than dealing with, say, SDL, which seems to have a corner on the market.

The alternative, it says, is to manage the translation process without any effective tools or pay a few million dollars for on-premise software.

TMA comes in two editions, Basic and Professional, and includes a project management platform that's supposed to be secure, scalable and easy to use.

It offers centralized collaboration, integration with business-critical apps and business analytics. If nothing else, it's supposed to make the review process - and negotiations between various stakeholders over revisions - less painful.

Cloudwords says it can support thousands of users per account and handle translation projects and file sizes in the thousands of gigabytes. Connection to the service requires a 128-bit SSL certificate and access to the production environment established two-factor authentication.

Both of its editions accommodate an unlimited number of projects, unlimited users, access to its vendor marketplace and competitive bidding platform, centralized storage, reporting and analytics. The Professional Edition adds a customized non-disclosure agreement (NDA), the ability to include multiple departments within the translation process, user roles customization features and an open API.

Cloudwords claims it'll save an average of more than 50% on a user's first translation initiative. CEO Michael Meinhardt is particularly keen to chase pharmaceutical accounts with their tediously long documentation. Think also web sites, training materials, marketing brochures, collateral materials, ads.

Translation has reportedly been Salesforce's second-largest line item. Apple is supposed to $200 million-$300 million a year on it. Cloudwords means to manage the money, part subscription, part percentage of the project