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I'm curious to hear how companies manage their terminology. Although I'm
interested in what tools you use to manage terminology, my main interest
is the processes used to select and maintain consistent terminology.
Internationalisation & localisation is pushing my company to get serious
about terminology as inconsistent terminology is costing us money. We
currently select terms manually and keep the lists of terms in Excel.
We're heading towards 2000 terms and that excludes GUI terms. My company
is located across several sites and we produce many different products
(hardware & software) which are increasingly being integrated. TRADOS is
used in localisation but we haven't yet got the funds to use MultiTerm.
We receive docs from all over the company to localise. I've some
questions:
- How extensive are your terminology lists?
- Do you give your English language terminology lists to the
localisation team? Do they give you theirs?
- If your company produces many products, do you have separate product
terminology lists or do you put them all in one terminology list? If
separate product terminology lists, how do you handle terms shared
between products?
- Who selects the terms? In my experience terminology lists drawn up by
those involved in localisation are always longer than lists done by tech
writers used to working in one language only. So does your company keep
one shorter terminology list for those writing the source docs and
another, longer one, for those involved in localisation? If so, how do
the lists link up?)
- How much information do you collect about a term (eg, definition,
context, different language versions, abbreviation/acronym, usage, ..)?
- Who validates the info about a term?
- How do you keep terminology consistent within and between product
documentation?
- How do you get people to use the correct terms in the documentation
they're writing/maintaining/translating?
- How do you handle synonyms?
- When a term is changed (say, "alarm level" is now "response level"),
how do you tell the translators, writers, MarCom, customers.?
- Do you use a terminology management tool? If yes, which one?
Sorry for all the questions. Looking forward to your replies. Thanks.
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