Terminology Management

Effective terminology management is the key to a quality and consistent translation of a company's product documentation and corporate collaterals. Proactive terminology management involves the creation and maintenance of a multilingual database covering all the terminologies used for a company's products and MARCOM materials. Because terminologies in the Life Sciences industry can typically be very specific and accuracy is of utmost importance, companies in this field should pay extra attention to their terminology management. Moreover, it is key that the localization provider have experience in Life Sciences L10N to understand this importance.

More advanced terminology management involves further defining and classifying the terminologies so that they can be applied to specific product localization and projects. Beyond the easy to use Excel tabular glossary list, there are many third party tools that help collect, define, classify and lookup terminology. These tools allow a translator to efficiently lookup and manage terminologies during translation by providing automatic lookup for terminology translation and a streamlined process for verifying terminology translation and consistency. Good terminology management tools also enable technical authors and translators to incorporate additional information such as definitions, context, gender, source, synonyms and product dependency, etc. Some tools also allow terminologies to be extracted based on certain sets of criteria such as occurrence, frequency, and origin.

Finally, another possible terminology management use is to publish a company's multilingual terminologies and glossaries over the Internet so that customers, employees and suppliers around the world can readily look up the information on demand. These online glossaries will help define how a company's product, technical, legal, and marketing terms should be used across multiple languages. They also ensure quality and consistent expressions and terminologies are used for multinational marketing, branding, and regulatory compliance.

Incorrect terminology translations can lead to the misuse of a company's products. For all industries this results in higher support cost and lower customer satisfaction. For the Biotech, pharmaceuticals, and all life sciences in general this higher cost is compounded with the critical importance of the translation directly affecting lives of patients. Quite simply, good terminology management makes a company's product easier to use, easier to translate, and easier to adapt to global markets.

Essentially accomplishing the same benefits as Translation Memory, Terminology Management Glossaries save time, save money, and increase consistency. It is believed that 15 percent of all localization costs result from the need to retranslate or rework inconsistent terminology. As corporate enterprises grow, they must tackle the challenge of maintaining consistent terminologies across many languages. This terminology will not be unique just to the industry, but to your company also. It is very important to identify and manage your terminology to establish a single accepted translation for each term within each target language. The end result: higher quality output that is more representative of a client's image and style and a reduced time to market.