Managing Corporate Terminology Is Easier Than You Think

Do your various company media and departments already use technical terms without a terminology management strategy in place? Then it is time to do something about that! After all, the consistent use of defined terminology contributes to a homogeneous corporate language and enhances translation quality.

But perhaps you are not overly keen on the effort of hiring experts or terminologists to dig through mountains of text and extract the technical terms.

So is there a way to do this quicker and in a more cost-effective way?

Yes, there is: automated term extraction from existing texts and subsequent inclusion of those terms in a terminology database. It takes only a fraction of the time needed for manual extraction.

Tool-based automated term extraction works with texts in different file formats (Word, PDF, XML…) but also with bilingual Translation Memory files. The extraction criteria can be fine-tuned, e.g. by using stop word lists, maximum word count, minimum character count, minimum/maximum number of occurrences, etc. The list of results is then revised by a terminologist afterwards and can then be translated, or the existing appropriate target-language terms can be added.

The benefits of tool-based automated term extraction as compared to manual extraction are:

• significantly less time and resources needed
• reproducible, more objective term selection criteria
• reasonable use of Translation Memory and bilingual files as the basis
• possibility of automated comparison with already existing term bases to avoid duplicates

A well-managed terminology strategy also requires for everyone in the company who writes texts to have easy access to the terminology. Terminology should evolve alongside your company and products. A browser-based terminology management system such as TermCloud by Gemino is therefore a convenient solution.