1. Terminology in the
translation industry
Alessandro Cattelan, Translated srl

2. Why use terminology?
Plenty of good reasons:
 Higher translation quality
 Shorter turnaround times
 Stronger brand identity

3. Higher translation quality
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

4. Shorter turnaround times
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.

5. Stronger brand identity
Bookmarks
Favorites
Customers use terminology to reaffirm the uniqueness of
their products.

6. An old survey goes…
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
[http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/terminology/introduction.html]

7. We all use and manage
terminology
No, not really.
Only a few localization-savvy customers and large
companies actually invest in terminology management.

8. Reality check
 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…

9. Terminology in real projects
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.

10. Creating a glossary or termbase
 Extracting the source terms
 Searching for or creating the correct target term
 Documenting terminology data (contextual or
linguistic information)

11. Extracting source terms
Language-independent tools
 Generate too much noise and silence
Language-specific tools
 Not ideal for language service providers
Manual extraction
 Time consuming

12. Generating target 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

13. Documenting terminology data
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.

14. Any questions?