Anyone with experience in managing the content development process can tell you that collective editing can be an extremely arbitrary and inefficient undertaking. When editing, even the most professional of reviewers has trouble detaching himself from the content being processed, which leads to an overabundance of stylistic and subjective revisions. While style and nuance are of the utmost importance for marketing content, when it comes to user manuals, regulatory documentation, and software strings, stylistic edits can be detrimental to content leverage, especially when wayward changes are made to pivotal terms in product documentation.
This becomes a more significant problem when more than one reviewer is editing a project. With collaborative authoring, especially as it pertains to technical documentation, maintaining consistency is the key to efficiency. You cannot efficiently edit a piece without agreement between terms. Any po-tay-toh and po-tah-toh disagreements, therefore, are not only moot, but can cost an arm and a leg when you’re dealing with a several-hundred page document. In fact, the cost of changing a single term varies significantly, depending on the stage of production in which it was changed.
A study conducted in the automobile industry reported that any changes made to terminology in the final (maintenance) stage of a product’s lifestyle cost up to 10 times more than they would have cost were the changes implemented in the editing stage of product development. Similarly, the cost for a single terminological revision in the maintenance stage of a product is 200 times more expensive than it would have been were the change implemented earlier on in the specification stage of product development.
The further along the development cycle that terminology errors are discovered, the more money it costs to fix them, because delayed discovery necessitates money spent on eleventh-hour corrections. Last-minute corrections are not limited to revising a single term within a single document. A single term disagreement can have far-reaching consequences, including the costs of reworking and re-designing documentation, rewriting associated texts, and the cost of reworking or even replacing documentation that has already been released to the public.
This exponential rise in cost is a true-to-form snowball effect, an unnecessary spiral of expenditure that could have easily been avoided had key terminology been proactively managed from the start. With a carefully designed glossary in place, editors have a foundation of sorts on which to base their revisions, effectively reducing stylistic term-related edits to a minimum. By removing this variable from the collaborative authoring process, properly applied terminology management can address inconsistency between terms before correction becomes a prohibitively expensive measure. Terminology management also focuses the editing process itself and, in the end, will save your organization a fair amount of both time and money.
Whether or not your product is intended for the international market, and even if you never translate a single line of text for a given service, terminology management is still an indispensible step in source-level authoring. This is because terminological inconsistency is an issue that affects all different forms of written communication that accompany a complex product or deliverable. To summarize the five aforementioned good reasons to manage terminology:
For organizations that have multiple, overlapping product lines, terminology management is essential to ensure that all interconnecting functions between different products are represented consistently in their respective explanatory literature.
For organizations whose products involve written contributions from more than one department, terminology management is the only effective method of ensuring that key product features and functions are referred to consistently by different functional groups.
A single product is accompanied by a collection of different document types, often created by different project stakeholders within a single organization. Managing key terms before the authoring process helps to ensure that vital and up-to-date terminology is uniform across user manuals, online help, software user interfaces, and regulatory documents, etc.
When there are similarities or differences between an old product and a new one, managing terminology at the source level enables writers to efficiently leverage content that ought to be reused, and avoid content that is out-dated or no longer relevant.
Editing collaboratively written content can be a messy undertaking. Collaboratively editing collaboratively written content, therefore, is an absolute nightmare. Companywide terminology management provides a structure in which editors and reviewers can focus on making objective revisions as opposed to making inefficient stylistic changes.
Each of these reasons is a good reason to manage terminology because, in the long run, they will save your organization a significant amount of time and money. Effective terminology management will help to minimize the presence of wasteful inconsistencies throughout the entire development cycle of a product.
It is a misguided perception that terminology-related matters are solely the domain of your preferred localization vendor. In fact, each of the above reasons applies to source-level authoring alone. Terminology management, when applied before the authoring stage of product development:
Beyond saving money on domestic product launches, terminology management can also greatly improve the return on your organization’s investment in multilingual localization. This is where the benefits of monolingual terminology management diverge from those of multilingual terminology management.
The concrete advantages of multilingual terminology management, though fundamentally under the jurisdiction of your preferred localization vendor, are to a degree dependent on the quality of your terms managed at the source. Nevertheless, with a clearly defined and expertly implemented terminology management strategy, the amount of time and money you can save extends to every target language into which you localize.