What is Terminology?

Product names, engineering terms, branding, trademarks, copyrights and more. Terminology management keeps them consistent and up-to-date in multiple languages

By successfully managing your multilingual terminology, not only are you protecting your organization’s global brand, you are also creating a foundation for consistent communication and knowledge sharing throughout your organization. With every content creator and translator using the right term, organizations can achieve remarkable improvements in brand consistency and content quality.

What is terminology?
What is a termbase?
Why is it important to manage terminology?
What is SDL MultiTerm?
How does terminology differ from a translation memory tool?
How does SDL MultiTerm 2007 differ from using a flat file glossary or a spreadsheet list of terminology?

What is terminology?

Terminology can be described on a basic level as a vocabulary of words, terms and phrases that are used for a specific industry, organization, or field of study. Within a business, terminology holds the key to a company's global knowledge management and sharing. Every business is likely to have unique terminology that helps with differentiation, branding, global communication and legal compliance. In the modern world, ruled by content online and the globalization of business, the unique terminology of a business (its technical terms, brand names, trademarks etc.) becomes increasingly important to manage and keep consistent in many languages in order to communicate effectively with customers worldwide.

What is terminology management?

Terminology management means bringing all of your organization's key terms together and consolidating the knowledge and data you have within your organization to create a repository or corpora of terminology. Getting started with terminology management can be done by extracting terms from existing documents and content, or from terminology lists that already exist. Gathering key stakeholders, content creators and translators together to decide on key company terminology in multiple languages will also help define and refine your terminology.

Once terminology is identified, it needs to managed and stored centrally in a database or 'termbase' within a terminology management system and online. This makes your company's terminology accessible by all within the organization, enabling sharing of knowledge and the common company vocabulary. Making these terms available to content creators, such as technical writers and marketing professionals, in addition to translators helps ensure terminology consistency throughout your content, in many languages.

Terminology management will involve not only the terms themselves, but also as much additional information, or 'metadata', around that term. Examples of key information that helps manage your terminology could be an image or video relating to that term, examples of its use in context, a link to related terms, or even lists of old terms such as previous brand names.

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. It makes terminology more accessible and easily searchable by anyone within the organization. It is an extremely valuable information asset for any organization.
Use of a termbase alongside style guide rules management for writing new content will help ensure accuracy and consistency during the content creation process. Integrating the same termbases into the translation process alongside translation memories will further increase that consistency and accuracy to help deliver a joined up global information management strategy.

Why is it important to manage terminology?

Terminology management is a key component to managing global content and communicating with global customers effectively. It can have many benefits for your business internally and for your brand and customers externally, including:

Better internal communications
Time-to-market delivery of global content
Cost reduction of translation
Legal and standards compliance
Brand consistency
Enhanced content quality

What is SDL MultiTerm?

SDL MultiTerm is the terminology management software from SDL. It provides one central location to store and manage terminology in multiple languages. By integrating with the content creation and translation processes, SDL MultiTerm provides the consistency, quality and productivity your organization needs to deliver content to your global customers.It is a flexible and scalable solution that allows you to manage project-based terminology or departmental termbases as well as large-scale enterprise-level terminology via your desktop or online through an Internet browser

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 a 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, share-able 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 your termbase is capable of growing with your business and your terminology requirements.

White Papers

SDL Research - Terminology Survey 2010

Read the SDL Research report of the results of the 2010 Terminology Survey to discover what businesses and translators are saying about terminology management, its importance in a strategy for global content delivery and the business implications of managing terminology in a global business context.

Terminology Matters White Paper

Companies are struggling to produce accurate and consistent global information for their local markets. Customer support costs are spiralling out of control, and growing content volumes are giving IT, Marketing and Sales departments a real headache.