Terminology Management

Terminology management is an essential component of successful multilingual translation and globalization.

From specifications and drawings, to technical documentation, regulatory documents and marketing collateral, all different forms of business communication are typically products of multiple authors in different locations. Because of this, terminology management is the most efficient solution for ensuring that your business consistently speaks with one voice. Securing terminological harmony across translated documents not only improves the usability of your products, it also enables you to better adapt them to global markets and establish a uniform corporate identity.

Terminology Management at a Glance

In a nutshell, multilingual terminology management is the process of systematically developing, collecting, maintaining and presenting words that have special meaning and application in a given subject field. It is composed of the following processes:

• Identifying which key terms are most closely associated with the product you intend to localize

• Mining legacy terms from previous versions of the product (and its related documentation) to ensure the maximum amount of content leverage

• Defining each term, and specifying a distinct set of terminological attributes (including part of speech, source context, usage status, etc.) that are most pertinent to your organization’s localization workflow

• Collecting these core terms in a centralized, accessible environment (such as a terminology management system or software application)

• Translating each term into your organization’s core set of target languages, ensuring that your corporate terminology is consistent both across documents and across all languages

• Dispersing multilingual glossaries to all functional groups that are involved in your product’s international development cycle

CSOFT services a number of Fortune 500 companies around the globe, for whom we manage terminological data in more than 90 different languages. We can help you organize and execute the management of your multilingual corporate glossary too. By proactively managing consistency issues at a very early stage, we are able to prevent minor discrepancies from becoming serious problems later on in the localization cycle, when correction inevitably requires more time, effort, and money.

If you are interested in learning more about how terminology management applies to you, feel free to check out some of the benefits of terminology management.