Main Content

Managing Enterprise Terminology –
Principles, Methods
and Business Objectives

Instructor: Kara Warburton

09:00 - 17:00 : Thursday, December 11 - Friday, December 12, 2008

Overview

Today, having an aggressive content management strategy is critical to your ability to deliver competitive products in multinational markets. You have to be able to produce high-quality content for multiple markets quickly and efficiently. Content is comprised of words, or terms, that are of interest by virtue of their marketing value, frequency, brand association, and familiarity to your customers. Taking steps to manage these terms during product development and localization will improve content quality, facilitate localization, and position your company advantageously for future development in information management technology.

“The wide variety of topics, from theory to very practical examples and exercises, all quite relevant.”
– Martin Paonni, Spanish Translator at the World Bank Group

During this workshop you will explore the following key issues that can help you successfully lead a terminology strategy that will support product development and localization:

  • Understanding the fundamentals of managing terminology
  • Getting buy-in from executive management
  • Evaluating the data and user requirements
  • Identifying the tools dependencies
  • Selecting the right technology
  • Defining the end-to-end process

The workshop will include practical exercises to be conducted online. Participants are requested to bring a laptop with a wireless card, if possible, in order to participate in these exercises.

Who will benefit from this workshop and why?

Members of the development team of products that are localized (software developers, writers) interested in

  • Learning why its important to manage their own terminology
  • Understanding how terminology is handled in the localization process
  • Realizing they have a partnership role with translators

Managers of localization projects interested in

  • Understanding the flow of terminology in the localization process
  • Learning how to minimize terminology problems

Information strategists and architects interested in

  • Learning how to integrate terminology into an information management strategy

Authors, translators, and other language specialists who are doing terminology work interested in

  • Gaining both practical and theoretical knowledge
  • Learning about standards


Agenda

Day 1 - Fundamental concepts, business value, best practices

08:30 - 09:00 Welcome and Introduction

09:00 - 09:45 What is terminology?

Why is terminology management important?

Developing a business case.

09:45 - 10:15 Hands-on practice: Issues with search and retrievability, brand visibility, translation inconsistency

10:15 - 10:45 Coffee Break

10:45 - 12:15 Basic principles

  • What is a term?
  • What is a concept?
  • Terminology versus lexicology
  • Synonyms and homonyms
  • Language perspectives
  • Terminology and information quality
  • Terminology versus translation memory

12:15 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:30 Data categories: terms, grammatical information, translations, definitions, abbreviations, and more

14:30 - 15:00 Hands-on practice: TM vs terminology, definitions, and synonyms.

15:00 - 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 - 16:30 Identifying your needs

  • Who are your stakeholders?
  • What are the practical business needs?
  • Controlled authoring requirements
  • Translation requirements
  • Other user requirements
  • Tools dependencies

16:30 - 17:00 Standards and best practices

17:00 - 17:15 Wrap up of day 1 and preview of day 2

Day 2 - Technology, tools, and process workflow

08:45 - 10:15 Technological considerations

  • Separating translatable content
  • Data design principles
  • Markup formats
  • Interoperability and dependencies
  • Input and output formats
  • Corpus annotation

Hands-on practice: converting a document to XML

10:15 - 10:45 Coffee Break

10:45 - 12:15 Tools review

  • Terminology functions in translation memory systems
  • Term extraction tools
  • Full-fledged terminology databases
  • Controlled authoring aids

Hands on practice:

  • Researching a term in an online termbase
  • Identifying terms from a term extraction file

12:15 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 15:00 Defining an end-to-end process

  • Roles and responsibilities
  • Term identification
  • Term evaluation and modification
  • Packaging for translation
  • Storing in a central repository

Case study: "cheat sheet"

15:00 - 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 - 17:00 Sharing and repurposing terminology

  • Sharing terminology, federated databases, TBX
  • Extended applications of terminology: search engines, spell checkers, machine translation
  • Wrap-up

About Kara Warburton

Kara Warburton, holds a Master’s degree in terminology from Laval University in Canada, one of the few universities in the world that provides a graduate degree specifically on terminology. For nearly 10 years, she has spearheaded the implementation of a terminology management strategy in IBM, and has been involved in the development of standards and best practices.

About LISA Workshops

LISA Workshops make use of presenters with real-world experience in the subjects they teach about. Workshops do not pitch any products or services, but instead provide a general overview with candid and practical evaluations of tools and products that impact your business.