What makes terminology management important for you and your business

 

When it comes to companies that operate on international markets, the need for consistent localization is more important than ever, and for some, it is even a prerequisite for compliance with standards.

We are here to discuss the role of professional corporate terminology management and what role it plays in the provision of consistent localization and why it should be a key strategic goal for your entire business.

 

First: what is terminology management?

Terminology management means the process of documenting terms in a systematized and orderly way. This process can be as simple as creating a list of terms that appear in a text and the equivalents of them in the target languages or might be as complex as creating a conceptual model and diagrams to show how terms are related to each other one way or another.

This process is vital and should be launched before a document is actually translated. Since terms are the key to the core meaning in a technical text, documenting them upfront can help linguists and translators to become even more familiar with the meaning of the text. While the step can take a little more time in the short run, it makes translation easier in the long run, since it helps the linguist to have more familiarity with the text and its meaning. Some theorists believe that translation is a decision-making process, and when terminology is managed beforehand, many of the decisions are already made before the actual translation begins.

 

How is terminology management important for my business?

It is so evident that terminology management is not the only key but it is one important piece in the entire puzzle that helps you achieve the success that you are looking for in your business.

The key points that terminology management helps in are as follows:

It will help you optimize your company’s procedures. Trying to have a longer gaze managing terminology is merely a solution to help the language of your business to be consistent and standardized. Implementing terminology management process will help not only have the right impact on the language which you communicate with your audience through, but this process will also help standardize the knowledge shared in your branches.

These glossaries and terms will remain as a reference for the creation of material to assist your new employees and staff respond more to any rebranding or changes in the tone of voice to be used with your public and its equivalents in the target language.

It will enhance your SEO efforts. Writing and translating technical documentation and writing for the websites are not the same thing. All these types of texts have to be spotless and should sound natural in the target language. Marketing offline and website materials also need to be appealing to your potential customers. Moreover, online material has specific requisites that need to be fulfilled in order to engage the highest number of online visitors possible. Therefore, following your keywords strategy and managing them is vital to your website ranking highly among all the available results of a relevant search engine query.

It will improve the productivity of your business on different levels. So, having a terminology management system helps you and makes life easier for your team and would ease pressure on your resources. Whenever you are in need of a translator or content writer, in-house or outsourced, simply you can share this approved glossary of terms and it will significantly reduce the time they need to dedicate to research before translating or creating any content or material for you, as this will allow them to devote more time to their final review in order to produce top-quality outputs in an easier, quicker way.

Most importantly, this will accelerate the translation and content creation process while maintaining the quality and consistency desired, as this will definitely be a plus if you want to reach your target markets as soon as possible by creating a stronger brand.

It will boost the image of your company. You really need to know that having standardized translations for your terminology will help the image of your company as one of the professional and well-organized entities, and would be the type of business anyone would like to receive support from or collaborate with.

Try always to have your internal processes for terminology to come from the same seed, and then your internal and external sources will surely appreciate working with a company like yours.

And always remember that a company-approved and well-defined term base will save the translators and proof-readers a lot of time and thus helps you speed up your work. And remember: Time is money, and glossaries mean less stress for everyone, a smoother workflow, and more fruitful results in fewer working hours.

“Check out a sample of our professional translation solutions in action with our Arabic version of this article.”