Focus on Standards

Organized by the China National Institute of Standardization and supported by prominent national and international terminology organizations, TSTT is the most important event in China in the field of terminology standardization. This time, it was held immediately after the annual meetings of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 37, which is responsible for international standards in “Terminology and other language and content resources.” The conference was well attended by several hundred delegates from all over the world who are devoted to standards and technological innovation in the field of terminology.

Michael Anobile, LISA’s Managing Director, gave a presentation about his organization’s role in developing and promoting localization standards. LISA strives to ensure that its standards work is complementary and synchronized with other standards organizations such as ISO, OASIS and the W3C Consortium.

LISA's TBX (TermBase eXchange), for example, is based largely on a previous ISO standard called MARTIF and uses the ISO 12620 data categories. And all LISA standards use the language codes from ISO 639. LISA Members and Partners serve an important role as a pool of industry-savvy implementers and practitioners who can ensure that ISO standards meet industry needs and will actually be adopted.

Editor’s Note: For more information on LISA localization standards, visit http://www.lisa.org/sigs/oscar/. For more information and to participate in the LISA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Terminology, visit http://www.lisa.org/sigs/terminology/.

Anobile then presided over a panel presentation where stakeholders from a range of different companies discussed their real-life challenges in managing terminology. Companies are beginning to realize that they have to manage their terminology in-house in order to control quality, to optimize reuse and to avoid being locked into one vendor or tool. In today's dynamic business environment, one has to adapt quickly to global markets, mergers and acquisitions, new technologies and vendor turnover. Taking ownership of terminology in-house can help companies adapt quickly to these changes when it comes to managing content and translation, as well as protect their intellectual property investment.

Separating translation assets, such as translation memory, from terminology assets was also recognized by the panel as important to optimizing the reuse and control of terminology. The concept of a “federated system” whereby different stakeholders both inside and outside of an organization can be responsible for certain components of its terminology, was considered visionary for the future (and in fact, this concept had already been discussed at the pre-conference ISO meetings).

The panel unanimously agreed that implementing a “terminology management strategy” is difficult because (1) it is a new concept to decision makers, and (2) it doesn't easily fit into existing corporate culture and technical environments. It is becoming obvious that the key to success is to empower one person in the organization to lead the entire effort. Everyone on the panel agreed that paying the salary of one terminologist to drive this effort would be “a bargain” for any company, given the tremendous downstream benefits.

Much of the conference was devoted to innovative solutions for improving terminology work in areas such as distributed terminology management, automated corpus analysis, software-enhanced terminology training and concept management systems. I gave a presentation about term extraction and moderated the afternoon program.

In addition, I also attended the ISO meetings. Significant progress was made at these meetings towards developing standards or guidelines in the areas of terminology databases, principles and methods of terminology work, localization of terminology, terminology products and services, XML formats for lexicons, and representation of linguistic features (morphology, semantics, syntax) required for extended machine applications. A project to develop a web-based registry of data categories for language resources is still ongoing. This registry, when available, can be used to officially register data categories for TBX and TMX, thereby helping to further disseminate these standards.

A new ISO project, “Translation and Interpretation Processes,” was launched, and LISA will obviously monitor its development. ISO TC37 will also be discussing with the ISO Central Secretariat the feasibility of establishing a database of ISO terminology. This ambitious project, if completed, will provide a means to view standardized ISO terminology across domains, resulting in a much wider distribution and adoption of standardized terminology.

For more information, read Warburton's 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