What is terminology?

By successfully managing your corporate 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.

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SDL Research - Terminology: An End-to-End Perspective
Terminology Matters White Paper

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 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. It also allows you to control the terms you define for your business and therefore helps you control your brand consistency. Use of a termbase alongside your existing translation environment ensures that your business can product more accurate and consistent translations, as well as becoming more efficienct.

Why is it important to manage terminology?

It is important to manage your corporate terminology so that you can guarantee that a consistent and accurate message is conveyed in all customer touch-points, in all languages. Without managing terminology it is likely that inconsistencies will occur with both source and translated content, which confuses and frustrates your customers, damaging your brand and impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty.

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. More information on SDL MultiTerm

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: An End-to-End Perspective

Both Businesses and Translators Recognize the Importance of Terminology Management and its Relationship with Consistent Branding, but are they Managing their Terms Effectively? SDL recently conducted two surveys to explore the current trends and opinions on the subject of terminology from within businesses as well as specifically within the translation and localization industry. This article highlights the key observations and trends from an interesting set of results

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.