16/03/2020

Clean and coordinated terminology is essential to achieve a high quality text, both when creating and translating a text. Nevertheless, in many companies, termbases lead a shadowy existence: they go unnoticed, are outdated, and have little significance or no practical use in day-to-day work. In some cases, the specialised terminology is only present in the heads of the company’s employees and has not yet been recorded in any list or database.

We can compile termbases using instructions, website content and marketing texts and we can also linguistically clean up the entries. All you have to do is compile a few files and send them to our in-house terminology team.

Using special software, possible candidate terms  are extracted from existing texts and automatically transferred to an Excel list. Our in-house terminologists check the candidate terms  for their general suitability, based on linguistic and terminological criteria. The result is available within a few days.

The result is a clean list, which then needs to be checked by a specialist reviewer. The review should be carried out by customer-facing employees who have a high level of technical and product-related expertise about the company and can answer the following questions: Are individual terms irrelevant or already outdated? Does the list contain several technical terms for one and the same thing? Are synonyms allowed or undesirable?

The verified terminology list can now be transferred into a database. The structure and form of the database often depends on your wishes and requirements. Our terminologist will suggest a suitable database and create the right database structure so that the terms and all necessary additional information can be easily accessed. Our terminologists can also help you to restructure and migrate terminology databases.

Databases occasionally require maintenance as they are actively used and expanded. Especially if they are used and edited by several parties. We put your datasets through their paces: Where is information missing, which values are not clear and where are there inconsistencies among the terms? It’s possible to clean up just the source language data or, of course, all the foreign language data. Of course, we can also check and clean up older terminology.

Terminology databases can be expanded in various ways. You can commission our terminologists to perform all additional steps in expanding the terminology if you do not have the capacity, suitable staff or resources available:

• Creating multilingual terminology databases
  Our in-house terminology team works with a variety of external experienced terminologists to cover all the languages required. Terminology work is therefore available for almost all languages and domains. Native-speaking terminologists research each technical term in the local language, check existing terms and provide all relevant additional information.
• Adding definitions and information
  A database often contains terms in the source or target languages, but lacks important additional information (grammatical information, definitions, contextual sentences). Our in-house and external terminologists add in all the necessary information by carrying out targeted research, thereby completing the database and helping to improve its usability.
• Continuous terminology development
  Your terminology grows continuously with every new product and with every new text. In order to keep your database up to date and to prevent the datasets in it from becoming obsolete, we offer to continuously develop your technical vocabulary. This can be done by regularly extracting datasets or by introducing a system where the translator suggests terms during the translation process. Step by step, your database will always be kept up to date.
• Expanding the user group – Rolling your terminology out across the company
  The more users that have access to your corporate terminology, the more cost-effective it is for the company. Various online solutions allow databases to be implemented quickly for any budget. User rights (read or write access) are defined individually, we provide hosting on our own secure servers and our terminology team provides terminology management and support. Online solutions are more advantageous than Excel lists in that they always keep terminology data up to date and do not require version updates. This pays off from the very first user.

If you would like to bring terminology work out of its shadowy existence, please get in touch. It’s easier than you think! Our terminology consulting service is available quickly and easily for individual queries:

E-mail: terminologie@oneword.de / Tel.: +49 (0)7031 7149552

Thanks to our in-house terminology team, databases can be processed in good time. In addition to the actual terminology work, our multi-member team is also available to you for consultation, offers and questions about our online terminology management system oneTerm and support requests.