Can we afford to continue to neglect terminology in our information management strategies? When will the authoring community realize that terminology problems don’t just occur in “other” languages? You’ve all heard about style guides and spell checkers. These tools and resources help employees avoid mistakes and to write in a uniform style. That in itself helps manage the costs and quality of developing and translating information. But neither one of these tools tells you if you have used an incorrect word, for example, an obsolete name for one of your products, or a competitor’s word, rather than your own branded term, in a marketing program. If your employees make these mistakes, and they DO, chances are translators will make them, too when they translate the material, and thus multiply the impact (and the cost).

So, terminology actually has to be managed within a language, any language, before it can be translated between languages to support localization. Your writers have to know what terms to use, and what terms to avoid. Likewise, your translators have to know the same for their own languages. Only then can a correct bilingual mapping between languages take place. Only this approach will result in better quality, fewer mistakes, and more efficient information production and translations – in all languages in which you produce information.

Today, we are expected to develop and translate information “on demand,” and to architect the information in reusable packages. Under these pressures, we’re using more writers than before, giving them less time to write, and pushing material through the publishing process at record speeds. The workflow path, and time available, between content authoring and translation is becoming shorter and shorter. This means that there is now little time to fix mistakes. Given these conditions, we need sophisticated terminology checking tools, backed with comprehensive company dictionaries, in order to achieve the goals of delivering high quality information efficiently.

The information business is shifting from a fixed product model, where information products had a long shelf life and a common customer base, to a dynamic product model, where information is customized “on-the-fly,” based on users’ particular needs. These factors create new challenges:

• integrating terminology management into the product development process;
• managing terminology on a global, rather than a product scale;
• finding appropriate tools that can handle a mixed bag of monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual terminology activities;
• addressing the diverse needs of both authors and translators;
• and dealing with employee resistance and the barriers that result from corporate culture.

Maybe people are starting to listen, at least, in the LISA community. At the recent LISA Asia Forum in Shanghai, the presentation on terminology (Managing Terminology for Content Management and Localization) was ranked number one by Forum participants, and the terminology workshop was popular as well. And with the pressure for intelligent terminology management growing outside of the localization industry, in areas such as search technologies and content management, those first to take action will gain a competitive advantage while the rest wonder why their costs and quality aren’t improving.

Editor’s Note: Kara Warburton is giving a workshop, Developing Products for Multinational Markets: Effective Terminology Management, at the LISA Global Strategies Summit in New York on June 29-30, 2006.

For more information, read Terminology: Getting Down to Business and Standards: Can We Develop Content and Manage Terminology at the Same Time?

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Kara Warburton is responsible for IBM's terminology strategy, including tools, processes and data management. She is the chair of the LISA Terminology SIG, which defines best practices, and is a delegate to ISO TC 37, which defines terminology standards. She holds a Master's degree in Terminology from Université Laval and has held positions as translator and information developer. Warburton has published articles, given conference presentations, and taught university courses on terminology. She can be reached at kara@ca.ibm.com.