Don’t just take our word for it. A number of expert analysts and standards organizations in the globalization industry regularly produce material detailing the concrete benefits of proactive terminology management, as well as standards that outline terminology management as a best practice in product localization.
Common Sense Advisory, the localization industry’s de facto leader of market research based in Massachusetts, released a study in February of 2009 entitled “The Case for Terminology Management: Why Organizing Meaning Makes Good Business Sense”. In the report, CSA’s analysts spell out the key benefits of terminology management, and also provide a collection of comments from professionals involved in managing terminology at the corporate level. These comments are composed of interviewees expounding upon the inconsistency problems they’ve encountered, and how taking a proactive approach to terminology management is an effective ongoing solution.
CSA’s interviewees were comprised of “individuals at 24 organizations in Europe and North America. Some participants oversee databases with a few thousand terms; others manage in excess of a million.” According to companies interviewed, terminological consistency is difficult enough to achieve in a monolingual context, let alone when dealing with multiple worldwide languages.
The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) has an entire Special Interest Group (SIG) comprised of industry experts (including representatives from IBM, Oracle, Nokia (now part of Miscrosoft) and Sony Mobile) who are devoted to promoting terminology management as a best practice in multilingual localization. In 2005, LISA’s Terminology SIG published a comprehensive survey on terminology management, in which they interviewed 81 different organizations from a variety of backgrounds on their terminology management practices.
Naturally, as a special interest group, the members of LISA’s Terminology SIG are markedly pro-terminology management. Nevertheless, some of their findings from the survey are undeniably persuasive. From the report:
"The results of this survey indicate that, although the majority of companies within the localization industry do engage in terminology work, the level of sophistication and dedication to terminology work varies widely, and many content creators consider terminology work to be a part of the localization process rather than a core part of the content creation process. This leads to imbalances in who carries out terminology work and problems in implementing systematic processes for the management of terminology." (LISA, page 5)
Straight from the mouths of the experts: Terminology management is not only an integral part of the product development cycle, but it must begin as early as possible in a product’s life-cycle, and must be implemented at the source level.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created a number of standards that outline terminology management as a best practice in localization.
Terminology Work – Principles and Methods
This 38-page document is an excellent introductory text to terminology management, including detailed guidelines for writing definitions.
Terminology Work – Vocabulary
This is another overview text that describes the major, high-level concepts behind terminology management.
Translation – Oriented Terminography
This document provides a wealth of information on managing terminology, with a focus on integration with translation environments
Computer Applications in Terminology – Data Categories
This document specifies the data categories that should be employed to ensure easy data exchange between systems that store and process terminology.
In addition to these standards for terminology management practices, ISO publishes literally hundreds of standards that contain specifications for monolingual and multilingual glossaries.