In Tridion Sites, we can configure a Metadata Schema for use in Translation Jobs, giving translation job requesters the ability to fill in fields in the Content Manager which are provided to translators.

This is quite useful to send information such as:

• additional dates related to the project
• financial or billing information for the project (e.g. purchase order)
• department-related information
• references to other systems (e.g. Jira ID)

The basic flow is described below. 

Idea: The integration could be improved if the metadata.its file is created as a nontranslatable reference or attachment file in TMS or WorldServer.

Currently, the metadata.its file will appear as "translatable" in TMS, for example. Though the file will show has having no words to translate, translators will move the file manually with the other files in the translation job and may be confused as to why one of the translatable files doesn't have words to translate. 

In customer projects, we are able to customize the translation-side workflow to automatically handle the file, though having metadata.its created as a reference out-of-the-box would be ideal.

Note that the ".its" extension is used here with this particular file. But ".its" can also be an actual translatable file manually uploaded or sent from other content repositories. So the translation-side workflow needs to also take care to distinguish between this file and other .its files. 

I would even suggest this would be the expected behavior and it might be worth a "breaking" change in a future version of Sites to let customers know to remove any customization around this file. Otherwise additional configuration could make this an option, though I would prefer this to be the default approach.