Terminology work (4) – fundamental decisions about the user

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

Most terminology works starts life in Excel – which is a very good way to get started, but not something you would use for professional terminology management.

Usually, when you start to think of terminology work, you already have a goal in mind or a pain point that needs your attention.

• Recurring questions from translators – you want to provide them with a term list or term base that can be used in the translation tool (for terminology recognition and terminology checking)
• Support tickets because users misunderstand the product or process description
• Company-internal effort to check translated documentation for the correct terminology
• You want to provide the company terminology to all users in the company through the intranet
• You want to provide terminology lists to the authors

Depending on the intended user group, the information associated with each term can be different. Whereas a translator needs to know the term, the translation, any forbidden alternatives and the product the term belongs to, other users in your company might need something more like a dictionary with information on gender, plural forms or context examples.

If you want to provide terminology for translation, ask your translation vendors what format a list should have, maybe they already provide online access to their term base system and allow collaboration on terminology online.

If you want to provide terminology as a company dictionary through the intranet, talk to your webmaster how a list can be brought online and, most important, how it can be updated periodically.

If you want to provide term lists for authors, ask them, if they are using a term checking tools in their authoring environment and how a term list would need to look like, to be easily importable.

Any of these settings differ in the way the term lists need to be set up and what kind of information (metadata to the term) needs to be added.

Angelika

(Trainer for translation tools since 1997)