Speaker 1: Ciao, I'm Massimo from SDL and today I'm going to talk about terminology management. So what is terminology management? I'd love to know how many people have heard this term, but it's one of the big things within the translation industry, the translation ecosystem. So I'm going to use quite a lot of terms. Terminology management is the process of identifying, storing and managing companies, customers or product terminology specific to those companies or customers or topic. And the key thing is that that terminology needs to be translated in a specific way. And that's why you need to identify, figure out which one of the terms you need to store it somewhere and you need to manage it because the term kind of has a life. You identify it. It might go through changes through its time and sometimes you also deprecate or kill a term and a term is kind of not used anymore. So that's a little bit about terminology management. This is actually quite a big topic. And so today is just a very brief, high level introduction. So how is terminology stored? So one way to make sure you keep these terms is to store them, funnily enough, in a term base. A term base is like a database, is a place where you can store these terminology. And we look in a minute, what is a terminology? And one of the interesting things is that not only you want to store those terms, but you want to be able to use and access those terms. So when you put them in this term base or database, and I'm not using the word dictionary, because it's kind of a little bit different, then it can be accessed by a CAT tool, which is a software that can help you translate. So what is in a term base? So this is the million dollar question. Lots of things can be in a term base. So it's obviously searchable and it's a database. It contains various things. First of all, a term base is multilingual. Of course, you can create just English to Italian or Italian to English. But one interesting thing in a term base, actually, you can create term bases with multiple languages. So, for example, you might have one term and the five, six different languages for that term. So you're going to store a term and the term is something. It could be typically a one word or a short sentence on how something needs to be translated. You could say SDL or Tradus. Those are terms. They are a brand and they don't need to be translated. You could say that actually even terminology management, that could be a term, because you might decide that you want to translate terminology management always in a specific way. And you know what? You know, translating terminology management in different languages might actually be, you know, you could translate it in different ways. And so if you decide this is how I'm going to translate terminology management into Italian, you want to make sure you identify that and store it. But you don't just store the term. You actually can store reference notes and rules on how you use that term. So you might decide you're going to say terminology management. You might store some context and you might say this is the approved translation. You might also have a translation that you absolutely don't want and say this translation is forbidden. But this is one example. There's endless examples. Imagine you're working in a sophisticated engineering type of context, where there are some really obscure terms for maybe pieces of machinery. You're storing the term and you might even store a picture. So you can actually see, oh, this is this piece. So it's kind of interesting how you can store lots of different information in the term base. One question that gets often asked is what is the difference between the term base and a translation memory? There are other videos on cut tools, translation memory. And so all of these work together. But translation memory stores whole sentences or even paragraphs, whereas a term base typically is made out of single words or short expressions. And they have to be translated in a very specific, consistent way. So that's kind of the main, main high level difference between a translation memory and what goes into a term base. So you've done all this work and you kind of got a term base. How does it actually work? So obviously, the biggest effort is creating the terminology, making sure that you are identifying those terms. You can kind of go about it in a couple of ways, by the way. You can do it all in one. You scour all your documents and create a term base. But you can also do it as you go, as you start translating. You might identify sentence by sentence, some terms that you want to identify, translate and create a term base entry. But once you have that term base, one of the key things in a cut tool is that you'll be able to search automatically whether there is a term in the source. So if you're translating again, English to Italian, there is that term in English. The software can automatically identify, huh, this is a term and this is how you should translate it. Or maybe how you should not translate it and give you that kind of piece of advice. So you get suggestions displayed to you as the translation happens. And so you can very easily insert, even as you type, you get automatic suggestions, a little bit like your mobile phone that kind of suggests words that you need to enter based on what you typed before. You can actually get a suggestion as you translate off what terms to use. So that's a little bit how it can be used on a daily basis. So once you've made the effort of creating the terms, then you get a lot of value as they get suggested to you as you translate. So what are the benefits of using terminology management? As I said, there's a little bit of effort required. In another video on translation memory, we talked about how translation memory kind of builds itself as you're doing your normal job of translating. Terminology might require a little bit more effort. You need to identify those terms and maybe you need to really think carefully what is the right translation. Maybe you need to even get somebody else to say, yeah, I'm OK with that translation for that term. But once you have it, the benefits are really significant. First of all, is around consistency. Translation memory helps with consistency, but terminology takes it to a different level to make sure that specific terms are translated consistently time and time again. And we've done some research and actually 48% of rework is down to terminology errors. It's one of those things that can go wrong really easily. So if you store it and you use it and it gets suggested to you, it can really help on consistency and in general with translation quality, because whoever is then reviewing that translation will see that you have stuck to the same terminology that they were happy with. Obviously, the fact that terminology, translation memory work together, it kind of helps. You've got one place where all of this is managed and the CAT tool ultimately gives you translation memory suggestions. It gives you your terminology suggestions. So it all works together in one place and it does save time. Some companies have term lists of thousands of terms, literally thousands of terms. Can you imagine having to scroll through manually and figure out, was this a term? How do I need to translate it? So having a terminology database that automatically identifies what are the terms and how they should be translated as you work and suggesting to you can save you a huge amount of time. So my take on terminology, and this is, as I said, is a really high level introduction. Terminology management is actually quite a big topic and we've got lots of webinars on this, which people normally find quite interesting. But in essence, it's a very worthy exercise. It's worth spending a little bit of time identifying and getting the right translation for the terms. Store them in a dedicated tool that then will automatically suggest those terms and translations as you work. And ultimately, not only you'll have better quality because you can use the accurate terms all the time, but also it can save you a little bit of time. So it's one of those things that is worth spending a bit of time up front to make sure that then you can save a lot of time at the end. Once you've done that effort, as you're working in your daily translation, you will save some time.