Terminology Management: It's All About Quality
Posted on Tue, Dec 15, 2009
Today Lili provides her perspective on how terminology management and glossaries impact language Quality...
Unfortunately, terminology is not recognized for its true worth as a Quality Tool. Terminology is very powerful: it helps transmit expertise, knowledge and culture locally within a company, as well as globally.
I see terminology like a gateway or an entry gate into the different worlds inside a company. It is important that these worlds understand each other since they all work towards a common goal: customer satisfaction and growth of the company.
Correctly used terminology leads to reduced costs caused by unnecessary communications and misunderstandings, and it guarantees appropriate translation into different languages.
Thus, the necessity to use the right term at the right place!
Glossary Creation - The Client's Perspective
Quality of the source documents on which the glossary creation will be based. These documents should be correct linguistically speaking, conforming to the rules of the source language.
Quality of the term candidates for the glossary. The client must keep in mind that to be efficient, the glossary creation work must be based on the following process:
- Terminology collection: the first step is to gather all communication material available inside the company pertaining to the field concerned by this terminology work.
- Analysis: this step consists of analyzing the data in order to extract the relevant term candidates. In other words, we will need to identify recurring terms and concepts, whether domain-specific or customer-specific terms with their meaning (definition and context).
The use of extracting tools is very helpful, but keep in mind that often words are extracted on their ownwithout any context. So if an extracting tool is used, the list of terms extracted would need to be reviewed by a language specialist, a terminologist for example, and that all the more since the list goes to translation.
If the glossary creation is the first step in a translation process, it is important that the client understands that the translatormust be provided with reference material (contextual information) and that validation of the glossary is essential before translation starts.
Glossary Creation - the Vendor's Perspective
Vendors should pay attention to the points described in the previous two sections (understanding quality of the term candidates), with the work being done by a terminologist or a language specialist.
If the vendor has to create the glossary prior to translation, he should ask for all the reference material relevant to his task. This can include marketing and sales documents, specialized documentation, etc. Then he should analyze the data to identify the terms to be included into the glossary. If an extracting tool is used, the same steps as described above should be followed.
What to Watch For
To sum up and to add a "technical" viewpoint, I've asked our terminologist, Fabrice Chabot, about the points he would watch out for when creating a glossary. He says:
- The frequency of the term in the analyzed documents
- The field concerned, ensuring the term belongs to that field
- The grammar category of the term: most terms extracted are nominal groups
- The meaning of a term: if an individual term belongs to a longer term (one that is several words long), it would probably be more relevant to choose the longer term as candidate for the glossary. For example: if "mask" is extracted as well as "subnet mask" and "character mask," it would be more relevant to take "subnet mask" and "character mask" as candidates, not "mask", since "mask" alone does not represent the same concept in both cases.