Particularly when dealing with larger or recurring translation projects, translators soon have to make decisions about the technical terms to use: this starts with rather simple questions, such as whether a given German “Schraube” will be a “screw” or a “bolt” in English, but it can extend to using designations specific to one company or product or determining where terms that have made it into a relevant industry standard are simply not used in practice.
For this reason, Mr Köbel creates term entries in customer-specific terminology databases in the run-up to the translation and during the translation process. In addition to the term as such, these entries will often give the term quality (from “binding” to “prohibited”), part of speech (e.g. “noun (f.pl.)”), one or more definitions taken from standards, technical dictionaries or researched on the web, context information, further notes on its use and even multimedia files for illustration.
In many cases, this can be done without bothering the customer, but these entries can also be the result of a short discussion and coordination with the customer, especially where company-specific wording is involved.
This seemingly high effort is worth it, though:
- It eliminates the need to research terms repeatedly and thus reduces delivery times.
- It increases consistency and thus makes the text easier to read and understand.
- It enables automatic quality assurance warnings of incorrect or undesired term usage and increases the quality of the final result.
On demand, DeFrEnT can provide you with the terminology created, for example in the XML-based terminology exchange format .TBX, so that:
- your in-house writers can create new content more consistently right from the start;
- proofreaders and revisers (acc. to ISO 17100) can also verify compliance with the agreed terminology;
- other translators can render the same concepts in the same way.
As you can see, maintaining terminology saves time and costs, both in writing new texts and in creating new versions, in the translation and revision of these texts, and further enables you to reliably and comprehensibly “speak with one voice” to your customers and partners.