Terminology management is the key to effective multilingual technical documentation.

The specialist terminology of a company should be managed centrally. However, the compilation of term bases and other terminology management tasks can only be completed successfully by involving suppliers, external service providers and various company departments.

Company terminology represents a company-wide standard and should therefore be used consistently throughout the company by all departments and suppliers.

The list of concerned parties is long and ranges from production, marketing and sales departments right through to documentation, administration and finance departments. Not to mention local sales networks, dealerships, technical documentation suppliers, corporate image consultants and, last but not least, translation companies.

This is the only way to ensure that a company is able to communicate both internally and externally in a consistent and uniform manner.

Well-defined company glossaries are not just important for translation work. They should also be employed systematically in the authoring of original texts in the source language.

Effective terminology management will result in the following:

• A company-wide standard for specialist terms.
• Definitions of terms that comply with legal and regulatory frameworks.
• A single term for each product, assembly and component.
• Improved corporate communication through clear, unique multilingual definitions of company-specific terms.
• Reduced expenditure on translation quality control and validation.

Terminology work starts with a project. The project defines the term base design and structure, the terminology tools to be used and the management procedures to be implemented.

A term base is essentially a database of specialist terms. Before embarking on the compilation of the database, the structure of the term base needs to be defined. Later, the term base will be added to, extended and maintained at regular intervals.

Terminology work is an on-going process.

The use of standard terminology is a key factor in the production of many different types of content, such as:

• Technical documentation
• Training material
• Software - from multimedia applications through to machine control programs.
• Website content
• Marketing and advertising material
• Customer care, maintenance and repair services

Consequently, standard terminology plays an important role in the subsequent translation of any of the above items, making translation work easier, more efficient and more effective.

Clearly defined terminology is crucial to producing an accurate, polished translation and, therefore, a high-quality final product. This is particularly true in those cases where meanings may not be immediately obvious to the translator. Without the aid of a specific glossary, the meanings of single items in software menus, on field labels, in on-line forms, in dialog boxes and in error messages are often unclear to the translator. Without the help of a term base, the translation of the isolated text items commonly produced by content management systems would be very time consuming, if not well nigh impossible.