What is Terminology Management?

Achieve consistent and accurate translations by using tools to store, retrieve and organize terms

Managing your terminology

Acronyms, synonyms and abbreviations can cause frustration for translators, especially when attempting to translate them without a clear understanding of their meaning.

Terminology management allows you to achieve effective and accurate translations by organizing these terms with a clear set of rules for their usage; this ensures that the correct term is used within a translation.

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.

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 you produce more accurate and consistent translations, and helps you become more productive when translating.

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 the lack of managed terminology can reduce client satisfaction and affect your ability to accept translation projects.

How does a terminology management tool 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.

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.

How does a 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 long-term business value is somewhat limited. This is due to flat files not being scalable, shareable or embeddable. To achieve maximum flexibility with your terminology, your termbase needs to be searchable in any direction, allow for limitless terms, users and languages. With SDL MultiTerm termbase 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.