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Translation Management: Benefits, Use in OTRS, and Context

Tobias Kortas — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:54:50 +0000

Translation Management: Benefits, Use in OTRS, and Context

2025-10-09
Tobias Kortas

Using OTRS

Different languages have always posed challenges — in customer service and ITSM just as much as in many other fields. As companies and their customer bases become increasingly international, people from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds and with different levels of language proficiency must communicate and collaborate.

In the worst case, language barriers can make communication nearly impossible. But even before reaching that point, serious issues can arise. Misunderstandings may occur when one or more people in a conversation are not communicating in their native language — especially when the topic involves complex details or requires deep understanding.

In short: some problems can only be solved through intelligent, system-driven translations. Beyond that, a professional translation management system saves both time and effort.

This article highlights the advantages of a well-designed translation management feature within a ticketing system and explains how OTRS makes handling multiple translations simple and efficient.

Context: Why Effective Translation Management Matters

For international companies, managing language diversity can be a real challenge. They need to ensure multilingual communication and a high level of understanding among employees and customers — while maintaining consistency, which automation can help guarantee.

Speed is also a decisive factor in support environments. Agents must be able to manage requests efficiently and respond correctly right away. When this happens, employees save time and customers enjoy a smoother, more satisfying experience.

Clear, accurate, and well-structured translations provide tangible value on both sides: for employees and for customers. They also help prevent misinterpretations and misunderstandings that can otherwise lead to embarrassing or costly errors.

Even smaller benefits, such as shorter processing and resolution times, translate into lower opportunity costs for companies and better service for customers.

Here are some key takeaways:

Effective translation management is a key element — alongside AI features and automation — of a modern, advanced service management solution.
Translation management is a major advantage of modern OTRS features over the ((OTRS)) Community Edition.
A well-developed translation system provides benefits similar to AI-based summaries: both improve clarity, understanding, and efficiency.

The Advantages of Advanced Translation Management

Fast and accurate translations deliver significant value. When organizations can easily view and manage information in multiple languages, they can communicate clearly and respond to issues quickly and effectively.

This also helps avoid opportunity costs by preventing misunderstandings and dissatisfaction. Poor, incomplete, or missing translations can quickly lead to frustration — both for customers and staff.

Below are the most important advantages of fast, high-quality, and comprehensive translations:

1. Major Time Savings

Being able to create multiple translations quickly and easily greatly reduces time and effort. This is especially valuable for multilingual companies aiming to boost productivity and efficiency. The benefits go beyond time savings — translation quality also remains consistently high.

2. Consistency

Texts and conversations often vary in tone or nuance across languages, especially when translations are not based on a unified foundation. When a system displays multiple languages side by side, the translations stay aligned and consistent. This helps prevent confusion, increases clarity, and saves additional time.

3. Less Repetitive Work

A key feature here is batch creation — generating multiple translations at once. Administrators can create translations for several languages in a single step, eliminating repetitive manual processes and speeding up multilingual content creation.

4. Scalability

Businesses shouldn’t be limited to local markets. To expand into new regions, language barriers must not become obstacles. With the ability to easily add and manage new language versions, companies can scale freely and efficiently.

5. Better User Experience

When translations are easy to create and manage, users benefit the most: they enjoy consistency, clarity, and a clear overview across languages. Any change made in one language is immediately applied to all others, keeping all translations synchronized and up to date — ensuring timely and accurate content across every supported language.

Translation Management in OTRS

In OTRS, administrators can extend their admin interface with the translation management feature, allowing them to create translations easily — without switching between individual language views.

Within the admin area, predefined terms for translations are available. Users can simply select and fill in these terms, or alternatively, define their own manually.

Translations can be generated dynamically via templates or through import functions to provide content in multiple languages. OTRS offers predefined text modules for elements such as brand names, dynamic fields, explanatory notes, or process descriptions. These system terms — meaning the terminology used throughout OTRS — can now be translated consistently and efficiently.

Translations can also include industry-specific terminology. Known system terms can even be customized.

In short, customers can now fully adapt their systems to their preferred professional vocabulary.

Technically, translations are possible for all languages, with around 60 currently available out of the box. Additionally, any user can propose translations through our public portal.

As a result, workflow management for multilingual content becomes significantly easier. Key characteristics include a unified interface for a clear overview, consistent terminology, and the ability to generate multiple translations simultaneously.

Looking Ahead: AI-Based Translations

In the future, OTRS will include AI-powered translation capabilities. This will specifically extend to communication content (such as ticket conversations), allowing for automatic, real-time translation.

This upcoming AI-driven translation service — with all the benefits mentioned above — will bridge language barriers by instantly translating both incoming and outgoing ticket messages into the target language. This ensures smooth, immediate communication across different languages.

Agents will work more efficiently and save time, while customers enjoy consistent, high-quality service in their native language.

Translation Management will streamline workflows without requiring special permissions or technical knowledge. At the same time, the AI service will make communication effortless: all users will be able to read important messages in their own or preferred language.

The service will be available via our AI Credit System.

In addition, OTRS users can take advantage of other powerful AI-based features such as intelligent ticket classification and AI-assisted response generation.

Conclusion: Good Translations Optimize Service

A well-thought-out translation management system is essential for delivering consistent, balanced, and responsive service — or simply for effective communication within international organizations. It’s about more than overcoming language barriers: it’s about ensuring clarity, precision, and true mutual understanding.

Within a ticketing system like OTRS, clear and easy-to-create translations across many languages offer major advantages — from time savings and faster request handling to greater overall clarity that leads to customer satisfaction, and ultimately, stronger loyalty.

Tobias Kortas

Using OTRS

Features in OTRS: AI Use Cases and Benefits

Tobias Kortas — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:00:27 +0000

Features in OTRS: AI Use Cases and Benefits

2025-07-01
Tobias Kortas

AI & Automation, Using OTRS

Today’s service teams have high expectations. They must provide fast, personalized, and high-quality support. This support often needs to be across many channels, in different languages, and under pressure.

Even the most dedicated employees find it hard to keep up. They feel overwhelmed by repetitive tasks, slow ticket triage, and time-consuming research.

To ease this burden and provide noticeably better service, teams need new solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications accelerate responses, streamline workflows, and increase productivity. OTRS’ AI features automate repetitive tasks and enable fast, high-quality, and transparent ticket handling.

Why AI Is a Key Driver of Efficiency

AI features and applications automate tasks and increase efficiency, allowing companies to accomplish more with fewer employee resources. Every agent should have an AI assistant. This helps speed up ticket processing and gives accurate answers. It also frees teams from boring routine tasks.

In short: When agents work smarter, not harder, they get better results with less effort. This leads to more satisfaction overall.

This reduces pressure and improves customer relationships.

It supports key performance indicators (KPIs). It aims to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for AI solutions. It also focuses on improving important business metrics. These include Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Additionally, it looks at employee satisfaction and productivity.AI-powered systems keep improving over time. They build on the base model and become more valuable with each interaction.

AI-enhanced systems significantly outperform traditional software, particularly in terms of efficiency and service quality.

AI Features in OTRS

As a ticketing system, OTRS doesn’t just provide AI tools—it gives users the power to work more efficiently.

AI applications are only as good as the time savings, quality improvements, and service enhancements they generate.

Here’s an overview of the AI services available in OTRS:

Ticket Classification and Service Description

This AI feature automatically analyzes and categorizes tickets. Not only does this save time, but it also ensures standardized, accurate ticket assignment. It can also trigger automated workflows such as escalation management.

This feature uses automated service descriptions. It creates consistent and meaningful summaries in seconds. These summaries include keywords and common request types. This significantly reduces manual documentation and forms the foundation for further AI use.

AI-Powered Response Generation

This service generates context-aware responses based on knowledge base entries. Agents review the natural language reply and send them directly. This greatly speeds up response times and helps solve problems better.

It also makes sure that answers are clear, helpful, and correct. This removes the need for long manual responses and searching through knowledge bases.

Sentiment Analysis

By using a large language model, OTRS AI features identify the emotional tone of incoming messages. They system determines how urgent or emotionally charged a request may be. Agents deal with cases differently based on a customer’s mood.

Sentiment analysis provides a quick overview and helps agents craft thoughtful, empathetic replies.

Real-Time Translation

This feature breaks down language barriers by instantly translating both incoming and outgoing messages. It enables seamless multilingual communication, allowing everyone to converse in their native language. This saves time for agents and enhances the customer experience.

Unified Knowledge Access

Responses need to be fast, accurate, and based on the latest information. This service integrates with both internal and external sources to ensure responses are current and consistent.

Accessing AI Services

AI features in OTRS are provided through credit packages that are tailored to specific needs. The features are microservices in OTRS. They are easy to set up and grow with your support operations. This also helps improve agent performance.

Pricing is simple and scalable: each AI action—such as ticket classification—costs one credit.

Ideal Use Cases for AI in OTRS

AI in a software solution like OTRS is useful in a wide range of scenarios. It’s especially beneficial when the goal is to save time, enhance the user experience, or increase precision. In these cases, automation, pattern recognition, and language processing pay off significantly.

Here are some ideal scenarios:

High ticket volumes: Service teams benefit from automation and easier scalability.
Multilingual environments: AI supports the setup of international, multilingual customer support.
Onboarding and productivity: AI shortens ramp-up time and boosts employee efficiency.
Improving customer experience: AI provides tools to better understand and serve unhappy customers.
Cost reduction: For cost-conscious businesses, AI helps reduce cost per ticket.

Benefits of Using AI

Using a dedicated ticketing system is already a big step forward for many organizations. Adding focused AI functionality takes productivity to the next level and helps evolve service management even further.

Here are five key benefits:

#1: Faster Resolutions

A key strength of generative AI is speeding up processes and reducing routine workloads. In ticketing systems, this means automatic ticket classification, priority assignment, forwarding, and response generation.

All of this speeds up the process, enabling quicker—and often better—resolutions. It eases the agents’ workload and, more importantly, increases customer satisfaction.

#2: Streamlined Workflows

One of the biggest challenges at work is the overload of routine tasks. These tasks prevent employees from focusing on strategic or creative work. AI frees them from these constraints, allowing for more value-driven tasks.

Sometimes, workflow management is less about perfecting processes and more about enabling employees to follow them without disruption.

#3: Improved Accuracy

The real power of AI lies in combining human and machine strengths. For example, as an agent builds a relationship with a customer, AI gives helpful case information. This information comes from internal or external sources in real time.

Agents can then filter what’s useful for the specific case—resulting in highly relevant, well-structured answers. Enhanced responses with rich detail are received by customers.

#4: Better Relationship Management

Empathy is a human strength. However, AI is very good at analyzing large amounts of data. This includes finding sentiment in text.

Sentiment analysis helps agents detect emotions quickly and prioritize tickets that may indicate frustration or urgency.

AI also supports personalization. It recommends actions based on historical data and understands each customer’s specific preferences and expectations. Summary generation helps employees quickly gain an overview—something that would otherwise require significant time and effort.

#5: Multilingual Support

Language barriers are one of the biggest obstacles to fully understanding issues and crafting appropriate solutions. Even when people share a language, fluency may not be enough to communicate complex details effectively.

Integrated translation eliminates this barrier. It enables multilingual support, regardless of the customer’s original language. Agents view requests in their chosen language. The system automatically translates their replies into the ticket’s original language.

Conclusion: Smart AI Usage Drives Business Forward

AI models are a game changer in ticketing systems—helping save time, improve visibility, and deliver more personalized service. When used effectively, customers clearly feel the benefits of AI.

A core rule of process automation is to first optimize workflows, then automate them. Similarly, AI should be implemented gradually in areas where it delivers high value.

OTRS’ AI credits provide a clear and flexible way to use AI features. This makes it easy to meet increasing support needs.

Tobias Kortas

AI & Automation, Using OTRS

Containerization: Revolutionizing Software Deployment and Management

Benjamin Müller — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 14:22:18 +0000

Containerization: Revolutionizing Software Deployment and Management

2024-10-07
Benjamin Müller

Best Practices, Using OTRS

Containerization has emerged as a state-of-the-art technology, transforming how software applications are developed, deployed, and managed. This article explores the concept of containerization, its key differences from virtual machines (VMs), how OTRS is adapting to this technological landscape, and the numerous advantages it offers our customers.

Containerization: An Overview

Containerization encapsulates an application and its dependencies into a single, portable unit known as a container. These containers are isolated from the host system and other containers, ensuring consistency and reproducibility across different environments. Containers share the host OS kernel, making them lightweight and efficient, allowing for rapid deployment and scaling of applications.

Benefits of Containers:

Portability: Containers run consistently across various environments, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Isolation: Containers are isolated from each other and the host system, reducing conflicts and ensuring security and stability.

Resource Efficiency: Containers use fewer resources compared to traditional VMs, resulting in faster startup times and reduced overhead.

Environment Security: Containers only include components needed to run the application, reducing potential attack vectors.

Network Security: Fine-grained policies for communication between components enhance security.

Differences Between Containers and Virtual Machines:

Architecture

Containers share the host OS kernel, making them smaller and more efficient.

Resource Utilization

Containers are highly resource-efficient and can be densely packed on a single host.

Deployment Speed

Containers can be spun up and down rapidly, ideal for dynamic, scalable workloads.

Architecture

VMs emulate an entire physical computer, including a full OS, leading to larger resource overhead and slower startup times.

Resource Utilization

VMs consume more resources during startup, making them less suitable for rapid scaling.

Deployment Speed

VMs are heavier in terms of resource usage, as they require a complete OS for each instance, leading to wasted resources and increased infrastructure costs.

OTRS’ Dedication to Containers

At OTRS, we are dedicated to following the containerization trend and are working intensively on enabling the operation of OTRS in a containerized environment. This results in several advantages for our customers:

Consistency: Containers provide a consistent runtime environment, reducing the “it works on my machine” problem and ensuring applications behave the same way across different environments. Because containers provide all required dependencies (like Perl version and CPAN dependencies, NPM modules, database and ElasticSearch requirements and many more) installation and update procedures are greatly simplified and result in reduced operating costs.

Portability: Containers encapsulate an application and its dependencies, making it easy to move applications between different environments, such as test or production systems, and even across different platforms or infrastructure types. For on-premise customers, this means applications can be seamlessly deployed across various data centers or hybrid environments without worrying about hardware or operating system compatibility.

Isolation: Containers are isolated from each other and the host system, enhancing security and stability by preventing conflicts between applications. For on-premise customers, this isolation provides significant security advantages by ensuring that each container operates independently with its own resources, filesystem, and network stack. This reduces the risk of one compromised application affecting others or the host system.

What We Are Currently Working On

We are constantly making necessary changes to OTRS to fully comply with the container philosophy. Key aspects include:

Refraining from Storing Files Locally: We now support the use of the de facto standard protocol “S3” for ticket content and attachments. We are also moving the processing of processes and ACLs from the local file system to a distributed cache using Redis.

Accessing Logs: We are working on enabling centralized access to logs from containerized applications, especially in a horizontally scaled operation.

New SaaS Infrastructure: We are developing a new SaaS infrastructure using Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, ensuring security, isolation, and optimal resource utilization.

What You Can Expect in Upcoming Releases

In upcoming OTRS releases, changes and functionalities will be introduced to make containerized operation fully possible. Each change, such as the introduction of support for S3 as an article backend, can be used immediately and not only with the introduction of containers.

Strategic Outlook towards a Containerized Future

Containerization has revolutionized software development and deployment practices, offering a lightweight, portable, and efficient way to package and run applications. Containers align with modern software development practices, such as DevOps and microservices, and their compatibility with cloud-native architectures has driven their adoption.

Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes have further accelerated the adoption of containers by providing robust automation and management capabilities. As the technology continues to evolve, containers are likely to play an even more central role in the future of software development and deployment.

Organizations that embrace containerization stand to gain a competitive edge by delivering software faster, more reliably, and with greater efficiency. This is why we are dedicated to introducing containers for the containerized operations of OTRS.

Benjamin Müller

Benjamin Müller is Chief Technical Officer of OTRS AG and responsible for OTRS Solution Management. With his team, he shapes the solution portfolio and researches innovative ideas.

Best Practices, Using OTRS

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