Terminology management and ROI: what is a term?
- Alessandro Pasté
- Sep 7, 2018
- 3 min read
If left unmanaged, terminology can become inconsistent leading to translations that contain competing definitions. This lack of consistency means that translations can't be re-used. The result of not being able to leverage terminology is that your translations become more time- and resource-intensive.
High follow-up costs added to the lack of managed terminology can reduce client satisfaction, jeopardize your brand, and could even put your company at risk: it could e.g. lead to the incorrect use of complex machinery, or leave your customers bewildered by incomprehensible texts. In the worst case scenario, it could result in a customer deciding against your product or service.
Many suppliers of translation and localization services talk about cost reduction and process optimization but neglect terminology management. A client needs to be aware that a common terminology management for all target languages (and ideally during source authoring) would present huge advantages as far as consistency, proofreading, corrections etc. are concerned.
Each error in terminology in the source language is multiplied by the number of target languages, occasionally causing major problems. Therefore you should have language professionals on board to tweak your source content to enable high-quality translations.
Let's take a little closer look at the matter in subject: what is/should be a term that needs to be recorded and managed?
There isn't a consensus about "what is a term". The classic theoretical definitions do not fit the practical requirements of managing terminology in production/commercial environments. What is a term in one environment may not be a term in another.
I think for any terminology database or process, it helps to document a definition of "what is a term" for the environment in question, so to avoid the terminology database being filled by "noise", but: be prepared to allow exceptions to the so-called rule. When in doubt, include it. One can waste more time debating whether something is a term or not and offset the return on investment (ROI) while it takes less time to fully document the term in a terminology database entry.
One can state that a term for documentation is: anything with a ROI and exclude what is stored elsewhere or doesn’t pay off.
Coming as I do from a multinational technology and consulting corporation, that started out with managing mainly IT terminology, but invests more and more in domain terminology extraction: we should see more names of "things" -- real objects like levers, tabs, etc. that populate the inside of a physical product instead of excluding those because they may not ordinarily figure in the documentation that goes to the end user of the product or service.
Excluding "things" that are not to be found in a glossary shows a blatant disregard for the ROI to be gained from rational terminology management at the logistical level. Studies have proven that a proliferation of names for physical objects (especially in the "Internet of Things (IoT)" era) used in the manufacturing process can lead to false economies in materials management and manufacturing, even errors in design.
Teams in companies ended up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for clients who rationalized their parts catalog based on sound terminological naming principles.
This approach involves establishing and maintaining close interoperability between terminological resources maintained by technical writers and translation experts on the one hand and taxonomies and item masters maintained by logistics, purchasing, and design specialists. You are potentially driving standardization, which leads to cost savings and cost avoidance.
On the one hand side, you don't want to document every single thing that your company deals with, because you might not have the bandwidth. On the other hand, that is exactly where the ROI might be. It takes a bit of foresight to anticipate the savings, but if you analyze your environment and the needs of it well, you should realize that even the individual parts are worth "organizing" and documenting.
Especially, if your terminology management system also feeds an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. There is so much that can be done with proper terminology management and half the time we completely underutilize our valuable data. "Big data" needs not only to be collected, but also managed to add actual value.
Professional terminology management is crucial, as is consistent use of terminology throughout the entire product and service process.
Do you want to start using consistent terminology in your products, manuals, marketing documents and websites? Then contact me at ale (at) terminologyworks (dot) com!
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