Are You Being Mauled By Your Terminology?

Jennifer O Neill Localization Specialist jennifer.oneill@fs.utc.com

Content Needs Terms But…

Untamed Terminology Can Bite…

… And Bite Bad

Why Does Terminology Matter?

Poor terminology is bad for business

Poor terminology:

• Impacts content quality & consistency

• Impedes communication

• Decreases customer satisfaction

• Hinders content reuse

• Decreases productivity

• Increases time to market

• Increases translation costs

• Corrodes your company’s branding

It disciplines words. Lets you use the same words consistently within and across different communication types (such as manuals, help, GUIs, marketing materials…). And lets you do this across multiple languages.

What’s Terminology Management?

Example of Terminology Gone Wild

English

Operating temperature *

Working temperature

Ambient temperature

Ambient temperature range

Temperature range

Temperature

* = Approved term

French

Température de fonctionnement *

Température fonctionnement

Température de service

Température d’utilisation

Température opérationelle

Température

It’s difficult for a customer to search for a product feature when the products themselves don’t know what a feature is called

“Terminology management makes content discoverable”

Andrew Lawless

Multilingual magazine, March 2016

What Can Impact Terminology Management

1. Organizational change

2. Business models

3. Department/product silos

4. Customer needs

5. Terminology management process

1. Organizational Change Case study: My company over the last 20 years

• Mergers & Acquisitions have brought together 24+ companies globally over the last 20 years

• Also several organizational restructurings

• Some companies are now simply product brands, and some have been integrated into other product brands

My Business Unit

Organizational Change & Technical Publications

• Flip-flopped between Adobe FrameMaker and MS Word depending on which US Technical Publications dept. was in charge

• Number of product groups handled by a Technical Publications dept. varied depending on M&As and organizational restructuring

• Went through three different style guides

• When terminology was managed, it was managed from the style guide but … our terms in one guide never followed us to the style guide of the next Technical Publications dept. in charge

Impact on terminology = We need to be able to manage our terms regardless of organizational change

The Problem with Style Guides…

Cover stylistic issues related to terms . No info on part of speech, deprecated terms, product group … Little incentive to standardize terms. Only around 350 terms listed in this guide shown (500+ products documented by writers) Product-specific style guides. Tend to reflect the needs of the Technical Publications dept. that created the guide Difficult to share terminology. Can’t easily share the term list with other company departments and translators

2. Business Models

• Product development done in-house or outsourced to OEMs

• Products sold through distribution sales channels or directly through own sales offices. Can impact translation reviews, and therefore terminology management, during the localization process. Much harder to get distributors to review content than your own teams.

OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer

OEMs produce software/hardware that are sold to many companies worldwide. Video security technology changes quickly so manufacturers often outsource product development and manufacturing to OEMs. OEMs drive down production costs due to economies of scale.

Product differentiation is important in a competitive market

Using another company’s terms can weaken brand identity

Outsourcing to OEMs

Impact on terminology = We want our approved terms used in the GUIs, not another company’s.

Dealing with “Contaminated” English and Unapproved Terms OEMs have their own terms, which can differ from our approved terms

OEM1 uses “Auto erase“ OEM2 uses “Expired time” (Chinglish) UTC Video approved term is “Auto delete mode” -- OEM uses “Circular recording” (Chinglish) UTC Video approved term is “Overwrite” --- OEM uses “Facility time” (Chinglish) UTC Video approved term is “Schedule”

OEM uses “Auto flip” UTC Video approved term is “Image flip”

--- OEM uses “Dehaze” UTC Video approved term is “Defog”

--- OEM uses “Power dome” UTC Video approved term is “PTZ dome”

Impact on terminology = We need somewhere to record deprecated terms and

to record from which OEM they originate. We need to be able to share a subset of our approved glossary with OEMs.

3. Department/Product Silos

Product integration is increasingly important • Increasing number of products with similar features

• Increasing number of products that need to be used together • Increasing number of localized products and languages

• Local teams increasingly working globally with other teams

But

• Terminology is still unfortunately too often project-based

Product groups create their own terminology in isolation

• Silos make sharing terms across products and departments difficult

Definition: A display technique where camera images (video tiles) are displayed on more than one monitor. One product calls it Picture Wall but another calls it Multiscreen --- One product group uses Primary Stream and Alternate Stream But another product group uses Main Stream and Substream And another one uses Primary Stream and Sub Stream

(and then there’s the issue of editing. One product group had 4 different ways of writing “Substream” in its software.)

Impact on terminology = To standardize our terms across products, we need to be able to track which term comes from which product. We need to centralize terminology management to help minimize the silo effect.

Silos make terms hard to share. Some of our video products use different terms for the same functions.

Impact of Silos on Product Integration

Terminology is a Shared Resource

Successful terminology management should make it easy to share terms (and their metadata) between all the different groups in a company, such as: • Technical Publications • Product Management • Marketing • Sales • Engineering • Technical Support • Training

Manage terms centrally

Terms can get political!

4. Customer Needs

Local & Global Customers want understandable, useful information – in their language…

… and the company wants them to have the information affordably and on time.

Want to burn money on your translations? Ignore your terminology.

Localization and Terminology Management

• Catch problems early: Too often terminology problems are discovered at the localization stage when it’s then too difficult and/or too expensive to fix

• Translation quality: Poor translation quality seriously discourages in-country reviewers from reviewing translations

• Shareability: Plan how you will share your translated terms in the terminology management tool with other groups

• Cost considerations: Standardizing terms will probably involve cleaning your translation memories

Impact on terminology = Standardize and validate terms in all required languages.

Get a budget to manage translated terminology.

5. Terminology Management Process

• Take charge of your terms! Manage both your source and translated languages. Terms don’t manage themselves.

• Organize your terms by concept

• Get management support to help deal with the: Politics Cost Time required

• Manage our terms regardless of organizational change

• Use approved standardized terms in our content for all required languages

• Record deprecated terms and, where necessary, record from which OEM they are coming

• Able to share a subset of our approved glossary for OEMs to use

• Track which term comes from which product group to help standardize our terms within and across products

• Maintain the glossary regularly as new products and their terms are added

• Centralize terminology management

• Needs of English and translated terms jointly considered

• Share terms across all languages with other departments and our sales offices that also produce content about our products

• Get a budget to manage terminology

What We Needed To Do

The Cost and ROI of Terminology Management

It’s hard to calculate the cost of mistakes and the spread of inconsistent content.

Terminology costs tend to be hidden in the general overhead of producing content.

Implementing terminology management can incur significant upfront costs.

It’s hard to prove the return on investment because it’s less visible.

But customer satisfaction is priceless!

Implementing Terminology Management

Get a “Term Trainer” on board

Source language terms: • Start building a glossary of the English terms using an agreed taxonomy

• Centralize terminology management so that everyone can see what’s been agreed

• Document your process

Translated terms: • Get the English glossary translated and approved by your in-country

reviewers. Get your sales offices on board • Manage both source and translated terminology together • You may also need to clean your translations memories

Term: Decide which terms to include, acronyms, abbreviations, company & product names, terms that have caused confusion, preferred synonym of a term

Part of speech: Noun, verb, adjective (at least 80% of terms in a glossary will be nouns)

Definition: Short description of the valid term

Context: Provide a short example of text where the term is used (optional)

Channel: Define the product channel that uses the term

Product group: Define the product group(s) within a channel that use the term

Source of term: Originates from the user interface or documentation

Invalid (deprecated) terms: Invalid terms that should not be used

Source of invalid terms: Which invalid terms come from which supplier (if third-party content is used, for example)

Status: Define whether it’s pending approval, approved, or obsolete

Term owner: Who is responsible for managing the term

Comments: Extra information about the term, such as whether or not it is to be translated.

Our Term Taxonomy

• Significant improvement in translation quality • 1600+ terms standardized and approved in English and multiple

languages • Much better knowledge about where our terms are used • Terms managed from product development stage • In-country reviewers make time to review translations (terms &

content) • Improved time-to-market for translations • Management supports terminology management • OEMs use our approved terminology in our products • Can now share our standardized terms (all languages)

with other groups, such as Marketing and the sales offices

The Benefits So Far…

• Need to get approved terminology accessible online to everyone Currently still managed from Excel

• Need to get approved terminology translated into more core languages

• Not always possible to standardize terms across products but increasingly we know where we use different terms for the same thing

• Incorporate new products groups into our terminology management process

• Terminology needs to be continually managed

Work Still To Do…

Summary • Terminology management takes effort and funding. Get management on board!

• Terminology must be an integral part of the product development cycle from inception to sale – in all languages

• Design a taxonomy for your terms that suits your content and business needs

• Centralize your terminology management. Don’t make it project based

• Plan from the start to easily migrate the English term base to a terminology management tool

• Maintain the glossary. An out of date glossary is a dead glossary

• Don’t ignore the impact of organizational change and business models on the terminology management process

• Think long term, not short term