To be able to successfully introduce terminology in your company you should manage to motivate all actors involved in different activities on different production or service levels.
Here are ten reasons you can go along with to motivate people:
1. Terminology facilitates clear internal and external communications – using consistent terminology for products, job descriptions, tasks, documents makes the internal and external communication processes much easier. In a company it could happen to use a certain term for an object during the development phase and a more promotional designation in the marketing department. If a unique term was chose from the beginning of the development chain no misunderstandings would arise between the departments.
2. Terminology is a marketing tool – corporate identity does not mean just logos and colours but also corporate communication enhanced through a well-established terminology that can differentiate a company from the competitors and impose it as a leader in a specific field. Being able to publish and establish your terminology collection on the market forces the competitors to adapt their own corporate language and use probably sometimes more unlucky variants of a term.
3. Terminology minimises the product liability risks- when consistent terminology is adopted users are able to better understand the instructions manuals and avoid damaging the product or hurting themselves therefore reducing risks of claims for damages.
4. Terminology contributes to better product usability- when establishing terminology, it is very important to take into account all user groups. Providing the user with the most comprehensible terminology for a certain product boosts the product friendliness and usability
5. Terminology provides legal certainty – clear defined legal concepts and consistent legal terms contribute to a better interpretation of laws and legal systems. Providing good legal terminology is of major importance in countries with more official languages, as legal texts should be made available in all official languages.
6. Terminology eases e-commerce – consistent indices and key words are key factors in any product catalogue on paper or online. They speed up the search for the desired products. Clients would find more easily their way in the online shop and won´t need the help of the customer support. Having explicit and consistent descriptions of products and product parts improves the ordering process and avoids delivering the wrong ones.
7. Terminology improves the efficiency and productivity of employees – various studies affirm that employees spend a lot of precious time from their daily work searching for information they could not find due to the fact that they use other key words that the ones used in the company. Established terminology made available to all employees helps reduce the time wasted on such research.
8. Terminology improves the translation process and optimises the localisation – through consistent terminology, translation variants can be avoided and match rates from the translation memories can be maximised. Using harmonised terminology in the user interface, the help and the manuals improve the user friendliness and the efficiency of localised software.
9. Terminology is a knowledge repository – The added value of a terminology database is that they present information in a very succinct way and there is no need of wasting time searching through an incredible amount of resources a company can have.
10. Terminology is capital – as we very well know, a big part of the capital of a company is in the know-how they possess in a certain domain. Terminology collections are “know-how databases” that can be reused in technical documentation, translation, localisation or marketing and this way increase the assets of the company.
Article written by Matilda Soare, trainee at TermCoord