Struggling through everyday terminology challenges:effective terminology maintenance and cost reduction.

Terminology Managementas Fitness

for translation projects

9th of May

Yulia Akhulkova, ITI Ltd.

CHALLENGES: 1. CAT EXPENSES.Localization Process Complication

and Rise in Price

Almost every CAT now has its Term Management System.

Investment in CAT:

• purchasing,

• examination,

• resources training (and forcing to use a new CAT),

• implementation into the workflow,

• your translation price indirectly includes the client’s expenditures on the particular CAT.

Benefits & cost reduction

Independence from CAT-tools No need to train resources for each new TM tool

No need to convert glossaries between CATs

Easy involvement of smart customers in localization processes More contacts and relationships with customer

Prompt understanding and approving => less terminology corrections => save time & money

Product community involvement if required It’s hardly possible to integrate product users into the CAT tools, but it’s easy in unified

terminology storage

SOLUTIONS: 1. Unified Terminology

Storage & Management

CHALLENGES: 2. Term mining

Good glossary looks like But usual glossary is more like…

USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGYNo glossary => No pain

?No glossary => More pain:

Without a terminology management system

Terminology is hardly controlled

Translation is inconsistent

Errors are easily propagated and hardly found

In localization projects each term should be: Additional support point

Low cost checkpoint

CHALLENGES: 2. Term miningUsual ways:

Term extraction utilities, based on statistical methods

Manual gathering from bilingual content

Usual problem:

Reducing costs on terminology gathering.

Features

Integration with: web dictionaries

encyclopedias

terminology portals

Minimization of user manual activity

Benefits

Fast finding of the term value:

Convenient Reply-on-Click operability

No need to learn ways of glossaries connection

SOLUTIONS: 2. Special Utilities

Time savingsEconomy

USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGYTerminology is already in TM, no need to create a separate glossary

?Without a derived glossary

you face a severe problem of choice at the very first occurrence of any term:

Which translation of the term to pick from the TM? More recent?

And if there’s no history for the term and no adding time specified?

And what about the context? Is it the same in the TM or different?

And what about the meaning of the term? Its concept? “Ask Google”?

…

To make your localization life easier, store the glossary separately.

The Glossary you gathered and saved in the Unified Storage

is your Intellectual Asset

that may be successfully reused again and again.

because it is stored independently from CAT-tools.

SOLUTIONS: 2. Terminology mining.Results

CHALLENGES: 3. Overweight glossariesIf the client sends you 10 000 “terminologically relevant” strings, how can you treat them properly?

Will you ask you translator and editor to remember all those strings while processing the translatable text?

Are you sure they will keep such amounts of terms in mind?

Do you think they are able to successfully apply them?

How much of your budget are you going to spend on this pseudo-control?

SOLUTIONS: 3. Proper attitude Includes:

Term concepts (UI, product-specific, DNT, etc.) and definitions

Confidence levels for terms: which translation you should trust?

History: tracking of term changes in the unified storage. You need to know, who changed the term and when to understand, which one to apply and why to avoid corporate risks

Smooth synchronization of glossary changes: spreading the info among localization team (for example, you need to urgently notify the translators of client’s latest term changes. Will you send Excel sheets? What will you do, if they store the glossaries offline in CAT project files on their PCs?)

Comments: for example, if you don’t protocol reviewer’s approved term changes, you would be hardly able to prove to client that your version had been initially correct and changed to incorrect by other team afterwards

Discussion: reading the team’s discussion on terms helps you (and customer!) solve the problem of choice

CHALLENGES: 4. Which attitude to choose?

The most frequently used terminology (management) tools as per Joanna Gough from the University of Surrey, 2012

• SDL Multiterm (14,7%)• ApSIC Xbench (4,5%) • TermStar (3,8%)

Other popular solutions• Kilgray qTerm• ITI multiQA.com• Interverbum Termweb• MultiCorpora MultiTrans Prism• CSOFT Termwiki• INTERPLEX• etc.

SDL Mul-titerm

ApSIC Xbench TermStar02468

10121416

Tool

SOLUTIONS: 4. Formulate and Prioritize your needs

Learning the glossary by editors and terminologistsEveryday notifications on changesTerminological plug-ins

(Financial) incentives for users properly enhancing the glossary

May exclude

GeneralitiesDifferent language pairs and projects

Rollback to particular date

User Management

(notifications, subscriptions, etc.)

Amount of terms added by particular user

Include on demandSource and Target

Context

Concept

Term Confidence Level

History of changes

Glossaries’ hierarchy: branches, clones

Include

Term Mining (crowd source)

Integration with QA

SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples

History

of changes

Example. Was the term the client’s reviewer claims you wrongly used already in the provided glossary?

At the moment of review the term was there.

But at the moment of translation it wasn’t. How will you prove your position to save your reputation? Search through e-mails? And if you occasionally don’t have those in your inbox?

In such case you obviously need logs from your TMS with info on who, when and why has imported the “harmful” term.

Rollback to particular date

SOLUTIONS: 4. ExamplesExample. No terminology on significant project. No time and/or budget for terminologists or additional term mining stage.Will you ‘blindly’ proceed with localization-without-terminology finding yourself at the minefield?Translators and editors of any team always investigate terminology while doing their job. If they have an option of on-click adding of the term into glossary, why not give them a chance?(Financial)

incentives for users properly enhancing the glossary

In such case you may consider token payment for valid term addition to user who inserted it.

Amount of terms added by user

Key Performance Indicators

SOLUTIONS: 4. ExamplesExample. You have got the brilliant glossary on the project and your client has kindly approved the terminology. How can you check that the terms are translated properly throughout the translation?

In such case you need your unified terminology system to easily interact with QA-tool to build a terminology check report on the selected glossary.

Integration with QA-tool

SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples

Example. Multilingual project. Lack of terms in one of the languages in TMS (new team involved). Give the team a chance to see the examples of other languages.

In such case you would need multilingual glossary with concepts for users to consider the meanings of the terms.

Example. Good release of English version of the product. Reduce time spent on achieving same results in other languages.

Thus you need unified multilingual “multi-user” tool.

Different language pairs and projects

Concept

SOLUTIONS: 4. ExamplesExample. In particular automotive project, let’s say Bentley, appears the general important term which needs to be used in other automotive projects. Will you copy and paste it to another glossary? And waste time on propagation?

In such case you need to have the clear hierarchy of glossaries and cloning option of a term or the whole glossary into another.

Glossaries’ hierarchy: branches,

clones

Example. Managing a set of glossaries at one project. If your client has sophisticated requirements to control, for instance, terminology of 4 glossaries stages (or even different glossaries), will you have and track 4 different copies and thus complicate the QA process?

In such case it’s better own 1 growing copy with an option to perform QA on selected branch (1 or more of 4).

USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGYMy Terminology Management Tool already supports all languages.

Enough for proper terminology control.

?

Choose the tool with minimum level of false positives in terminology QA procedures.

In languages with flexions Linguistic Support in TMS must not mean only storage,

but associated Quality Assurance procedures.

SummaryThe most effective way to make your terminology fit is the right choice of the Tool or TMS, which covers all of your terminological requirements.

Terms live their own life, from birth (meaning offered term status) to death (meaning obsolete), and you need to know how to treat them properly to make

them fit and working.

But regardless the tool the thing you can’t exclude from terminology management is the work of the person, who makes terminological decisions.

P.S.

Taking into consideration the growing variety of Terminology Management tools and systems, the best solution could be using required term management options and facilities through API.

Then all the tools could successfully interact, combining their functions to better the localization world.

But that’s a kind of utopia, isn’t it?..