Best practices in translation-oriented terminology management

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Best practices in translation-oriented terminology management

Think about a three-hour seminar on terminology and immediately you will be overcome by a wave of boredom! But definitely not when the speaker is Licia Corbolante.

The former terminology expert at Microsoft, now Terminology Guru in Italy, gave a breathtaking presentation on terminology with the title: “Best practices in translation-oriented terminology management”. The seminar was intended for the terminologists of EU institutions and was also transmitted by videoconference in Brussels.

Did you know that reverse dictionaries can give you a term even when you don’t know the definition? And that Google NGram could be a useful tool for improving the validation in IATE?

Are you aware of how difficult is the decision-making process for software companies behind the selection of the right term to be used for naming new functionalities? And what if the company realises just after wasting a huge sum of money that the users are already using a different term?

By taking as examples the Termcoord blog series ”IATE term of the week”, Licia provided interesting suggestions for making IATE a more useful tool not only for translators but for whoever is working in the knowledge management sector.

For example, due to lack of time, journalists cannot perform the necessary research to find and use the proper terminology. IATE, if timely updated on the terms appearing more frequently on the hot news, could provide the right terms to the journalists. This way they could use the public version of IATE as their primary and most reliable resource for terms, with the guarantee that they are approved and double-checked by the EU terminologists.

Licia Corbolante had participated also to one of the open seminars of TermCoord in 2011 called TermITes & CATs, and is since then in close contact with the Terminology Unit giving precious feedback on its work.