10 Good Reasons to Manage Your Terminology

There’s a common misconception among businesses engaging in localization that terminology management doesn’t apply to their product development cycle. Whether owing to the fact that traditional methods of terminology management are ineffective, or to a lack of understanding about the concrete benefits of maintaining corporate glossaries, many organizations are of the opinion that managing terminology is the sole responsibility of the language service provider (LSP) involved in a localization project.

While it’s true that a majority of marketing collateral in the SaaS sector of the globalization industry is concentrated on multilingual terminology management systems and software, this focus overlooks the fact that effective terminology management, in addition to being a quality assurance procedure that should be employed by your preferred localization vendor, is primarily a preventative measure that ought to be taken at the source-authoring stage of a product’s international development cycle.

In a nutshell: The true benefit of terminology management is rooted in its ability to anticipate and check the proliferation of consistency issues at the source level. Beyond that, terminology management can also serve as an equally viable means of correcting terminological disagreement at the translation stage of a product lifecycle.

The first half of this article deals with the benefits of source-level terminology management in the authoring and editing stages of a product’s development cycle, whereas the second half will focus on the benefits of multilingual terminology management as a best practice in the localization workflow.

The first good reason to manage terminology