Jonathan Golan
Business Translations Ltd.
Hebrew Localization Done Right!
Terminology Management
Managing clients' terminology can cause frustration for translation agencies, especially when attempting to translate terms without a clear understanding of their meaning. Terminology management allows you to achieve effective and accurate translations for your clients by organizing their terms and defining rules for their usage; ultimately ensuring that the correct term is used within a translation. This not only ensures accurate translations, but also helps achieve consistency in branding for your clients.
What is Terminology?
Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and phrases which describe products, services or industry jargon. They frequently drive competitive differentiation. Most companies use an increasing number of industry or organization specific words which need to be accurately stored, shared and translated. Terms could be anything from a product name to a marketing tag line. The incorrect usage of terms in client translations can have a negative impact on translation agencies, causing inaccurate and inconsistent translations, which ultimately lead to poor customer satisfaction.
What is a Termbase?
A termbase is a central repository, similar to a database, which allows for the systematic management of approved terms in both source and target languages. Use of a termbase alongside your existing translation environment ensures that your business can produce more accurate and consistent translations, and become more efficient. A translation agency can share their termbase with a client or receive a term list from a client to populate an existing termbase.
Why is it important to manage terminology?
If left unmanaged terminology can become inconsistent, leading to translations that contain competing definitions, this lack of consistency means that translations cannot be re-used. The result of not being able to leverage terminology is that your translations become more time and resource intensive. This added to a lack of managed and ultimately approved terminology, reduces client satisfaction and your ability to accept translation projects.
What is SDL MultiTerm®?
SDL MultiTerm is the terminology management software from SDL. It provides one central location to store and manage terminology. By providing access to all those involved with applying terminology, such as engineers and marketing, translators and terminologists, it ensures consistent and high-quality content from source through to translation. For more information visit the SDL MultiTerm section.
How does terminology differ from a translation memory tool?
A terminology tool is a searchable database that contains a list of approved terms and rules regarding their usage.
A translation memory tool differs, in that it stores segments of text as translation units (in source and target pairs). A segment can consist of a sentence or paragraph.
Translation memory is typically used in conjunction with a terminology management application to ensure terms are consistent in the translation.
How does SDL MultiTerm differ from using a flat file glossary or spreadsheet list of terminology?
Although a flat file can store terms, its ability to offer real business value over the long-term is somewhat limited. This is due to flat files not being scalable, share-able or embeddable. To achieve maximum flexibility with your terminology, your tembase needs to be searchable in any direction, allow for limitless terms, users and languages. With SDL MultiTerm your term base is capable of growing with your business and your terminology requirements.
How do I extract terminology from existing documentation?
With SDL MultiTerm Extract, the terminology extraction tool from SDL, you can automatically locate and extract terms from existing monolingual and bilingual documentation, saving the arduous task of manually selecting terms. For more information visit the SDL MultiTerm Extract section.
What terminology products does SDL Language Technologies offer?
SDL Language Technologies delivers an intelligent family of terminology tools that enable you to manage and share your terminology:
SDL MultiTerm Desktop - manage your terminology in one central repository
SDL MultiTerm Extract - extract existing terminology from legacy documentation