Terminology Management

Terminology management is a core part of the overall quality management process for translation. Terminology management is often a complex decision-making process involving many stakeholders in an organization. For example:

• When dealing with terminology in client-facing materials (such as a website), the customer's marketing and branding department may need to get involved.

• When dealing with terminology in a product, a product team and technical writing team would make the final decision.

For these reasons, the localization department of the customer typically does not have final decision-making authority for terminology. Instead, customer reviewers are responsible for making the final decision on terminology.

Term submission process

When Liltlancers suggest a termbase (TB) entry, the term does not immediately appear in LILT Translate for translators. The term must be accepted by a reviewer for it to show up as a TB suggestion. Once accepted, the TB entry will appear within any document sharing the same LILT Data Source.

Term submission guidelines

Term submission should be done with caution since the decision-making responsibility belongs to the customer. Keep the following points in mind when you want to add or approve a new term.

Do

• Check with your LILT services team to understand requirements before adding terms (some programs have external terminology systems).

• Use the Segment context sidebar to make sure the associated Translation Data Source doesn’t already contain the term you want to add in any form (singular, plural, lowercase, capitalized, or as part of combined words).

• Perform a quick search to ensure the translation you want to add is widely accepted in the locale.

• Check a trustworthy dictionary for your language (i.e. Oxford Dictionary for English) to make sure your translation doesn’t conflict/contradict with the source term’s definition or connotation.

• Include the following metadata to each entry you add:

  • Part of speech (POS)

  • Context

Don't

Don't add:

• Typos

• General terminology (a termbase is not a dictionary)

• Terms that appear infrequently in the document

• Terms you are unsure of and want someone else to confirm

• New translations for an existing term (unless you add metadata to indicate specific and distinct use)

Don't add terms that are:

• A number

• Context-sensitive

• More than four words

• Variants of existing terms:

  • Differences in capitalization

  • Inflected forms of a word