The Dos and Don’ts of Terminology Databases

With the ever-increasing importance of translation software in the industry today, it is important to take a look at what these resources are for and how best to manage them. Specifically, let’s look at Terminology Databases. You may also have heard these referred to as glossaries or dictionaries, or by Trados MultiTerm as Term Bases.

The main purpose of terminology management is consistency. Terminology databases are not supposed to be an exhaustive resource on a language. Bilingual dictionaries serve this purpose, and are readily accessible online, as software or in print. Terminology databases, however, should be specific to a client’s company, and contain only terms used in their documentation. To be useful in a terminology database, terms should follow the three Rs.

Recurrent – a term should be expected to come up frequently in future translations where this database is to be used. This is important for maintaining consistency across all the translations, and also saves the translators time by eliminating the need for them to translate the term from scratch each time.

Relevant – to be included in the terminology database, it is important that a term is relevant to the particular client’s business. It must be something that is important to be kept consistent, to facilitate understanding of a client’s documents, and to avoid confusion. If it doesn’t matter how a term is translated, it does not belong in the terminology database.

Representative – the term in the database must represent its primary use in the client’s documents. If a term’s translation in the database is not relevant in most of the contexts in which it appears in the files to be translated, it can be restrictive for the translator and give rise to unnecessary terminology queries.

Keeping these three Rs in mind, it becomes clear that a bigger terminology database is not necessarily a better one, and that it is important to have someone to carefully select the terms to be included, assuring that any added or changed terms are consistent with similar terms already in the terminology database.