The importance of ISO Standards for Terminology

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ISO is an independent, non-governmental international organisation made of 161 national standards bodies, founded with the aim of regulating and facilitating international trade. Up to now, ISO has published about 22,210 documents covering almost every industry, service and system in order to ensure quality, safety and efficiency.

The need of harmonisation is particularly evident in the field of terminology, where, despite of the joint effort of institutions, terminologists and translators, a lot of confusion may occur.
New terminology is developing at a fast pace, in different countries and in different domains. Each country could develop different uses for the same term depending on the context in which the last one is used. Besides, the communication could be less clear due to a lack of standardisation and differentiation between term and concept level.

For this reason, new standards have been developed with the aim of reaching a clearer and more effective communication in monolingual and multilingual contexts.

As we all know, translation and terminology are closely linked, and the need to retrieve memories and terminological information for specialised text is growing, highlighting the need to develop guidelines and criteria for the quality control of terminological information contained in translations.

The International standards also take into account the tendency of working in a team, laying down some useful principles that are essential for the interchange of terminological data.
In order to have a clear view of all these guidelines on language and terminology, here you can find a list of related ISO standards.