New insights into terminology management?

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signposts-999685_1920Three international translation standards have been recently published: ASTM F2575-2014 Standard Guide for Quality Assurance in Translation, ISO 17100-2015 Translation service and ISO 11669-2012 Translation projects. As an expert in the fields of translation, localization and terminology, Uwe Muegge wrote the article Do translation standards encourage effective terminology management?

Thanks to this paper we can have an idea on how terminology management can be dealt with:

ASTM F2575-2014 Standard Guide for Quality Assurance in Translation. Since 1898, ASTM has been voluntarily working on the development of standards in the industrial context. As we learnt from the article, this guide includes some steps that have to be taken into account when dealing with a translation project. However, it does not mention terminology directly, but as one of the 21 key factors that translation suppliers should perform (e.g. a glossary should be presented either by the requester or the supplier of the project, however without specifying its particularities).

ISO 17100-2015 Translation service. According to this guide, suppliers of translation services should provide all the means, including terminology management, in order to produce a translation. This task can be achieved after an agreement between the requester and the supplier on which terms are going to be used in the text.

ISO 11669-2012 Translation projects. This guide also provides information about the desirable steps to follow during the completion of a translation project, focusing on the facilitation of the communication between requesters and suppliers, and the result of this interaction: the translation, as a product of quality. In order to achieve that, it recommends creating a terminology database, one of the more complex tasks to accomplish during such a project, but just in order to avoid inconsistency and misunderstandings.

In general, the author comments that the title of his article cannot receive a positive clear reply, even if according to a survey conducted by SDL, 92% out of 1500 linguists consider “terminology management as a ‘very important’ part of the translation process.” Also, the author thinks it would be interesting if those guides provided information about the steps to be followed to properly manage terminology and about terminology management tools.

We think that the fact that some of those standards (e.g. ISO) are not free, and can be read only in languages such as English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, and/or Chinese, cause some communities not to be able to access to these guidelines neither apply them. However, the existence of such guides may be very helpful for communication.

There are still many improvements to be done in the field of official guidance for terminology management, which should include the management of collocations. According to Diana Djaloshi (Centre for Albanological Studies), this could be a difficult task because phrasal terms are “constructed on the basis of single-word terms already found in the language, and only rarely using loanwords from another language.” Actually one of the key factors of the usefulness of terminology management is the inclusion of new concepts in a given culture, which should be done by using its own linguistics means. This can sometimes be difficult because of the influence of some languages on others; in line with Vilma Proko-Jazexhiu (Centre for Albanological Studies), this is because of globalization, a circumstance that linguistic studies cannot ignore.

It is a shared opinion among linguists that terminology management has vital importance for communication. However, it is important to have a clear agreement on how to manage terminology.

Sources:

 Ana-BennasarWritten by Ana Bennasar

Terminology trainee at TermCoord