Gary Lefman
August 4, 2016

This series offers some insights from the many workshops and presentations on terminology that I have done over the years.

Don’t be afraid of terminology work!

Yes, there are many things you can do with terminology, but you can also start small and build upon it when time and resources permit.

How would you get started?

The most obvious thing is to collect what is already there.

A list of product and company names

 
  • Decide on the spelling that you want to use.
  • Decide if and when any of these names needs to be different in one of your target markets (for example in countries with different alphabets or Asian countries that use characters rather than letters
  • Make sure everybody in the company knows about this list and that translators have access to it as well.
Now build upon this list
  • Think about how product names are created in your company. Is there a pattern? Should there be a pattern?
  • How do you make sure that everybody uses the product names correctly? Are there checks for the source text authors and translators in place?
  • Do you discuss new product or company names with target language experts who can tell you if the proposed name might have any issues or unintended meanings in that language?
  • Make sure that whoever wants to change one of these names knows that they will have to shoulder the cost of changing it in all documents and all languages.

 

A list of abbreviations and their meanings

Everyone in the company will have a list or post-it or file that lists some of the company-specific abbreviations and their meaning.

  • Collect these lists
  • Award the person who comes up with the longest list
Check the list
  • Make sure that the combination of abbreviation and long form of the word are accurate.
  • Make sure everybody in the company knows about this list and that translators have access to it as well – they will be especially thankful as this list can help the translation tools to recognize better where a sentence ends (i.e. NOT at the dot of an abbreviation).
Now build upon this list
  • Think about how abbreviations are created in your company. Is there a pattern? Should there be a pattern?
  • How do you make sure that everybody uses the abbreviations correctly? Are there checks for the source text authors and translators in place?
  • Make sure that whoever wants to change one of these abbreviations knows that they will have to shoulder the cost of changing it in all documents and all languages.
  • Talk to your translation vendors and create the list in such a way that it can be easily imported into the term base components of the translation tools.
  • See if the lists can also be used within content management or authoring tools to help the authors.

 

These things sound obvious, don’t they? But you would be surprised how often this is one of the last steps when people talk about terminology management.

Angelika

(Trainer for translation tools since 1997)

1 Comment on Terminology work (1) – how to get started InUncategorized