Terminology Management

Businesses need to deliver a consistent global customer experience in order to avoid diluting the value of their brand. Establishing your brand’s terminology can help you build your brand’s capital.

Our experience shows that putting terminology management first will save you both time and money. Terminology management tools like QTerm and MultiTerm integrate with modern translation tools, and some tools (like XTM Cloud) have terminology functionality built in, which means that linguists can automatically choose the right vocabulary. This helps prevent re-work and shortens total localization turnaround times. What’s more, established terminology makes it easy to check those terms automatically when your language service provider performs quality control checks before delivery to you.

Creating Terminology Databases

Your terminology is an asset. You own it. At Argos, it’s our view that terminology databases or glossaries should belong to you as well. If you decide to rebrand any part of your business, having a centralized and controlled terminology management system in place means that you are empowering those who are tasked with carrying out your rebranding exercise. Finally, localization process changes (such as implementing machine translation) will be much easier if you have established agreed terminology.

Getting Started

At Argos, we realize that one size doesn’t fit all. Some businesses have terminology that is constantly evolving and growing. We update their glossaries with new terminology for every single project, resulting in a continuous “approval cycle” with the client’s in-country personnel. In such a situation, it is very important to have a centralized place where terms are controlled.
Argos has developed a sophisticated system which allows us to identify new terms and highlight them so that the linguists working on the project know that they need to translate those terms as part of the project.

Because these types of clients often have concurrent projects running at any given time, our system color-codes terms for translation or terms awaiting approval using different colors, depending on which project they belong to, so that nobody gets confused about the status of a particular term.
Other clients prefer a one-off approach. This usually means that we create a glossary based on a client’s existing translated content, and then only update its contents at agreed intervals. Either way, the key to terminology is to get started – even small terminology databases of approved content will result in more consistent, better quality translations.