The 4th of April is a date that all technology lovers should celebrate. On this day in 1975, in fact, the tech giant Microsoft was founded by childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The company, originally created to produce computer software, quickly expanded to become one of the world’s most influential leaders in technology.
Besides the most common software and devices we all know about, nowadays Microsoft offers a range of services not many people are aware of. One of those, particularly important to the terminology community, is its language portal and termbase.
The service, made public in 2009, provides general language resources, such as downloadable localisation style guides, a searchable terminology database, a feedback tool, and a blog with all the updates on Microsoft’s language-related activities. The termbase contains approximately 25.000 IT-related terms in up to 100 languages, and you can access it through our terminology databases list.
The language forums within the portal are another useful resource to improve the company’s products. The forums represent a community space, mainly used to discuss new terminology for Microsoft products, but also to monitor neologisms or translate IT terms into the missing languages.
We at TermCoord had the honour of meeting Licia Corbolante, an Italian terminologist and localisation specialist, who worked at Microsoft until recently as a Senior Italian Terminologist. She took part in some of our seminars and shared her experience with us. Here you can find the .pdf document “Working with Terminology at Microsoft”, a description of her presentation given at tcworld in November 2008.
Written by Silvia Morani
Communication Trainee at TermCoord