Tagged: terms

Let’s chat about terminology and best practices

Our latest monthly chat was on a topic at the core of technical communication: terminology. Fourteen of us working in technical communication and translation got together by phone/web chat to share our thoughts and experiences on this topic and hear how we were all managing our terminology.

Terminology isn’t just for localisation

Unfortunately when some companies hear the word “terminology”, they simply think “localisation” – terminology management is a part of the translation process. But it actually kicks in right at the beginning of product development. If you don’t watch your source language terms (for most of us that’s English), then you risk messing up your translated terms too, impacting quality, cost, and time to market of your products across all languages.

Most of us in the chat had between 500 and 5000 English terms documented, usually kept in Microsoft Excel. Some used a permission-based wiki to manage their company’s source language terminology as it is ideal for sharing and collecting information in a central repository. A participant remarked that terminology management systems (TMS), which are used to store and retrieve terminology information, can be difficult to implement.

Yet many of us have problems keeping terminology consistent and correct across all our required languages. And a frequent reason was multiple groups across a company creating their own terms, such as software developers.

Best practice: Collect and control terminology early in a product development cycle.

Who “owns” the terminology?

We agreed that the terminology management process and reaching consensus were more important for ensuring consistent and correct terminology than which tool is used to manage the terms.

Practically none of us had access to a terminologist. The terminology work usually falls upon the technical writers and translators. Yet a common problem faced by several in the group was not being included in the team designing the user interface and advising on the terms to be used. One translator in the call has been asked by a client to propose English terms for them to use in their software.

A couple of us were in the fortunate, and enviable, position where the Technical Publications department is responsible for their all company’s English terminology. In one company the developers can’t use a term in the user interface unless it has been approved by Technical Publications. Sadly this is not usual in most companies.

Best practice: Have a terminology team that selects, defines, and approves the terms.

Controlling the English

Unfortunately for many of us dealing with inconsistent or poorly defined terminology is a regular problem.

One solution proposed in the chat is to use simplified English. One participant uses an open-source (and free) term checker for ASD Simplified Technical English, which is fully customisable. Go to simplified-english.co.uk for more information on this tool.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) had a mixed impact on terminology. Sometimes companies let acquired/merged groups keep their different terminologies as often their products stay separate. However, when products are integrated following an M&A, reaching consensus on terminology can often become political. Managing terms then becomes particularly complicated.

Best practice: Use consistent and correct terminology that has been approved by the company.

Importance of structuring terminology

The translators in the group regularly have to work with terms that are poorly defined so it’s often difficult for them to know the context and figure out how to translate the terms.

We need to provide more information about a term than simply its definition. If you only provide a list of English terms and their translations without definitions or context, then over time the quality of the software and documentation translations will decrease. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to discuss how we collect our terms.

Every term should at least have a definition, subject field, context, part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, or adverb), and abbreviation/acronym (if relevant). Depending on how many products and channels there are, you could also classify the terms by product/channel group. It’s also worth thinking about including the associated deprecated terms so that everyone knows not to use them.

Best practice: Document each term with appropriate metadata.

Find out more on managing terminology

An excellent document how to manage terminology is: Terminology for Large Organizations (link opens PDF).

Results of a survey done in 2010 on terminology practices in the localisation & translation industry: TTC Survey 2010 (link opens PDF).

Glossing over our glossaries

by Jen O Neill

We’re increasingly hearing about how important it is for us to manage our terminology as it impacts documentation quality, translation cost, branding and customer satisfaction.

It’s no secret that most terminology problems start in the source content. Unfortunately the inconsistent use of terms in user interfaces, online and printed documentation, marketing material and web content often only comes to light during the translation when it can be too late or too expensive to fix.

Glossaries used by writers are often inadequate

Although we all probably use company glossaries or style guides to help us use terms correctly and consistently in our work, the glossaries often represent only a fraction of the terms we actually use in our work.

A clue that our glossaries may not be comprehensive enough can often come from the translators (our customers may also be having problems with our terms, but we’re rarely in contact with them).

Translators often complain that those responsible for creating the source content don’t document enough terms. They may receive a glossary from us with only a couple hundred terms or less to help them with their work. According to the terminologist, Barbara Inge Karsch, content creators document only around 20% of the terms needed by translators.
Also see our post on the SDL terminology survey last year.

For example, in my company we found out at the translation stage that we had five different ways of saying “power up” in our English manuals:

Power up, power on, energize, activate, start

However, only one of these terms, “power up”, was included in our glossary. The other four were unapproved undocumented terms that had all been used (several times) at some stage by writers. Perhaps when reusing existing content from different products or by a contract writer new to our products.

How many terms should we document?

It depends. It depends on the size of your project, the complexity of the products being documented, number of terms already documented, your budget and resources.

Barbara Inge Karsch has a good discussion on selecting terms in her blog post “How many terms do we need to document?”

However, few companies can afford the services of a dedicated terminologist. Indeed smaller companies may not even have an editor to help ensure that terms are correctly used by writers.

As technical writers we have to stop pretending that terminology is a “translation problem”.

We’re implicated as creators of the source content. We need to ensure that we develop comprehensive glossaries at the start of a project. This will free developers, writers, and ultimately translators, from spending time researching the terms themselves and potentially coming up with multiple terms for the same feature, which then go undetected throughout the product life cycle and can impact usability and incur extra costs.

Heading towards terminology management

Ideally we shouldn’t be keeping our terminology in a style guide or spreadsheet as they can eventually become too inflexible. Unfortunately terminology management tools are still expensive. For many of us, particularly if we’re lone writers or work for a smaller company, they may not yet be an affordable option. This is why Microsoft Excel is so widely used in the tech communication environment to manage glossaries. Everyone has it.

So spreadsheet tools are useful to help start us managing our terminology as they let us collect the terms we work with. And that’s the challenge, collecting the terms. Developing and maintaining a comprehensive glossary is hard work. But the sooner it is done in the documentation process, the better.

As Barbara Inge Karsch says,“As terminology management becomes more accessible and as needs for terminology data become more important, it is up to content creators and LSPs [localisation service suppliers] to learn more about this area and to find ways to consider terminology requirements earlier on in the document creation process.”

A recent survey on terminology management

by Jen O Neill

Even if you only produce documentation in a single language and don’t deal with an international audience, using consistent terminology matters.

SDL recently released the results of a terminology survey that they conducted earlier this year. The study is an interesting review on the trends and opinions on the subject of terminology management.

They asked two groups about terminology management: a business audience and translators.

When asked what they considered to be the most important impact of inconsistent terminology, the business audience replied the quality of the content, internal communication and customer satisfaction. Inconsistent terminology also impacts the cost of translation and branding.

Three departments are largely responsible for owning the terminology in a company: Technical Publications, Translation/Localisation, and Marketing. They’re responsible for the management, maintenance and approval of terminology.

The most common internal process they used for managing terminology were style guides and spreadsheets to store terms. Over 35% of the business respondents said that they keep their terminology in a style guide. However, only 50% shared their terminology lists with other departments in the company.

This lack of sharing with other departments obviously increases the risk that departments could be using different terms for the same meaning. And yet, as so many departments in a company use common terminology—not just technical publications and marketing—it’s a lost opportunity not to collaborate in sharing terminology to ensure consistency.

All parties taking part in the survey agreed that the problems related to inconsistent terminology start with the source documentation. Indeed 40% of translators said that they frequently encountered inconsistent terminology.
The translators said that the main impact of inconsistent terminology is on translation quality, style and consistency, client satisfaction and their productivity. These are the parameters often used to measure a translator’s success and performance. We can conclude from this that consistent terminology makes the translator’s work much easier as well as improving quality.

An interesting point shown in the survey is how few companies take responsibility for their terminology in the localization stage. The translators said that only 15% of clients drove terminology management. Terminology management just isn’t part of the localization strategy of many companies (they do have a localisation content strategy, right?). Indeed it’s more likely that the translator takes ownership of terminology than the company that created the source documentation being translated. We put all that effort in creating a document and then practically abandon control over it when it moves to another language.

An example: Same meaning, different terms

Over the years my company has been through various acquisitions and mergers. Being a global company, content is also created across the globe by different groups. The content is often then reused in different documents. All this has provided many opportunities for inconsistency in our terminology. For example, the following six terms have all appeared in our product datasheets.

  • Operating temperature
  • Temperature range
  • Temperature
  • Working temperature
  • Operating temperature range
  • Ambient temperature range

Unfortunately these terms all describe the same feature: the operating temperature of a product.

The datasheets were subsequently translated into multiple languages. The inconsistency in the English source terminology has bred inconsistency across the other languages—a domino effect. We’ve found that, for example, we have four different ways to say “operating temperature” in French and three different ways in Spanish (I gave up counting for the other languages). This inconsistency with just one term illustrates the widespread impact that poor terminology management can have across multiple documents and languages.

SDL’s survey clearly showed that terminology needs to be managed during the whole content life cycle, from the moment we decide a source document is needed through to the localisation of the content.