Terminology in the

translation industry Alessandro Cattelan, Translated srl

Plenty of good reasons:

Higher translation quality

Shorter turnaround times

Stronger brand identity

Why use terminology?

Using terminology…

Makes the translation easier to understand and more

accurate

Ensures consistent translations within the same project or

over different production cycles

Allows for automated quality assessment to be performed

on the translation

Higher translation quality

Save time during translation

Translators spend too much time searching for the right

term.

Collaborative translation

A team of translators can work efficiently on the same

project only when sharing good linguistic resources.

Shorter turnaround times

Customers use terminology to reaffirm the uniqueness of

their products.

Stronger brand identity

Bookmarks Favorites

According to a survey by the Localization Industry Standards Association:

80% of respondents who actively manage terminology reported

an increase in product quality

74% reported an increase in productivity

62% saved costs, and

56% felt it increased their company's competitive edge

An old survey goes…

[http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/terminology/introduction.html]

No, not really.

Only a few localization-savvy customers and large

companies actually invest in terminology management.

We all use and manage

terminology

Most customers do not want to invest time nor

money in terminology management.

Language service providers cannot invest time nor

money.

Translators have no time…

Reality check

For most translation projects:

Customers do not provide any glossaries or termbases

There is no time to create a termbase

Glossaries are generally only used for collaborative

projects or large ongoing projects.

Terminology in real projects

Extracting the source terms

Searching for or creating the correct target term

Documenting terminology data (contextual or

linguistic information)

Creating a glossary or termbase

Language-independent tools

Generate too much noise and silence

Language-specific tools

Not ideal for language service providers

Manual extraction

Time consuming

Extracting source terms

Extract terms from bilingual documents

Concordancer or word alignment

Search for a target term in reference material

Manual process

Generate the target term

Manual process

Generating target terms

Less is better

The cognitive effort to process information can slow down

translators and actually impair productivity and quality.

Information provided to translators should be punctual and

strictly relevant to the work they are performing.

Documenting terminology data

Any questions?