8 Features of Terminology Management Systems We Really Love

术语管理系统的八大优质特性

2020-05-03 22:03 RWS

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Content flows around the world. How do you manage it all while honoring the “voice” that is your brand? Robust translation technologies are must-have tools for multinational businesses serving a multilingual consumer base. A terminology management system is just one of those: you can store, manage, and access the key source terms and translations that describe your products and services — whether they are the approved terminology or the rejected. Here are just some of the top characteristics of terminology management systems that make them beloved by the world’s best global companies. 1. Consistency Let’s place a critical switch on your product that controls one of its key functions. Imagine the confusion then that could result from every department of your company using different terminology to describe that same product part. The marketing team is calling it a thingamajig on the website sales page, the technical writers are calling it a doodad in the user manual, and the engineers placed doohickey on the label above the switch on the product itself. (By the way, those are all actual generic terms for the same thing: a whatchamacallit.) The beauty of a terminology management system is that it helps your content creators — in whatever department they may be working in — understand that a common termbase is both right for product users and for the translation teams that would otherwise carry that confusion forward into the target language materials. Confusion is one aspect, but extra costs another. Inconsistency in the terminology used decreases your potential re-use or leverage you could otherwise get from existing translations. Also, by and large, productivity of translations is up if translators can quickly and easily access approved terminology. Many terminology management applications provide features to ensure that the consistency is maintained by making it possible to insert definitions, show proper usage, or otherwise share instructions that are specific to clients, products, and more. 2. Centralization Of course, content creators, translators, and diverse internal departments have been used to operating in their silos — contributing to the inconsistency issue described above. Another benefit to terminology management is, therefore, that these diverse stakeholders can — with user rights/approvals — contribute to, connect with, and share the resources of a single, central terminology base. When you are working with multiple translation teams, you recognize that centralization of terminology is your means of standardizing terminology usage. Unsurprisingly, this contributes to cost and time efficiencies: no more time wasted in determining whether a term is approved for use or not and no costly error corrections to documents where outdated terminology had been used or where one translation team used a term different from another team’s choice. 3. Automation Afraid that building a terminology database will be a painstaking, hair-pulling chore? Well don’t be! Thanks to automation features in terminology management systems, building a reliable termbase starts with your legacy materials. You do not start from scratch: you import your previously translated materials along with their source-language documents. From your already developed resources you can — relatively painlessly — extract, search, index, group, and categorize terminology for use in new projects or, more generally, as an integrated part of translation management workflows that include glossaries, translation memories, and style guides. In a similar vein, automation can help analyze the existing source language content and using frequency analysis identify repetitive source terms for potential inclusion in your termbase. When used with bilingual data, the same functionality may suggest potential candidate translations for any new terms. 4. Integration The beauty of having your multilingual terminology in order comes from the ability of your terminology management system to maximize its value by integrating with other essential tools that are part of today’s translation workflows. For instance, automatic checkers will verify the consistency of the terminology used in your translations with your termbase, and produce a report that can be used to easily pinpoint potential errors upfront. Similarly, your terminology system should allow for a smooth integration with your translation management system or your authoring tools. 5. Roles and Workflows Having a large team of translators or editors accessing your termbase is great, but without some sound functionality that allows you to assign appropriate roles to individual users, things can easily fall into disarray. It should account for various roles such as content creators, those who can query, suggest, validate or update specific terminology, those who can provide context or definitions, import or export glossaries, as well as the wide range of potential users on the client as well as the LSP side. Having a sound system of user roles is then essential for creating standardized workflows that account for individual scenarios, such as: Terminology validation process for new terms identified by content creators or customers Terminology validation process for new terms identified by translators during the translation process Process for managing terminology changes, including managed changes to approved legacy terms Last but not least, your terminology management system should support the two terminology-related ISO standards used — ISO 10241 (Terminological entries in standards) and ISO 704 (Terminology work – Principles and methods). 6. Metadata Terms as such are effectively useless without context. So a good terminology management system should provide for an easy way of managing specific metadata that go with each term. These metadata — such as status, source, product, project, domain, date of entry, history and dates of changes as well as users — are critical for translators or terminology approvers. They enable them to understand the context and history of individual terms so they can make informed decisions about their use and to perform advanced termbase management operations. 7. Standards Support Your terminology management system should not work in isolation. Terminology should easily flow in and out of your termbase as needed. For that, look to support for standards such as Term Base eXchange (TBX), the ISO-approved, open XML-based standard for exchanging structured terminological data. Further down the road, look for new exciting developments such as the potential interoperability with the XLIFF 2.0 Glossary Module (via TBX). 8. Future-Proofing Let’s say that your company has grown from 10 products localized into 2 languages to 25 products localized into 15. Now imagine the amount of content that you would have to create for them all. Today’s terminology management systems can grow with the content produced for your different needs. Moreover, the best systems help you track that content in whatever format it may be displayed in — whether for content headed to the print shop or content headed to your website.
内容在世界各地流动。在传播品牌“声音”的同时,你该如何管理这一切? 强大的翻译技术是为多语言消费者服务的跨国企业的必备工具。术语管理系统就是其中之一:你可以存储、管理和访问描述产品和服务的关键源术语和翻译——无论是批准的术语还是被拒绝的术语。 这里是术语管理系统的一些顶级特性,这些特性使它们受到世界上最好的全球性公司的喜爱。 1.一致性 让我们在产品上放置一个关键开关,以控制其关键功能之一。想象一下,如果公司的每个部门使用不同的术语来描述同一产品部件,可能会造成怎样的混乱。营销团队在网站销售页面称其为thingamajig,技术作者在用户手册中称其为doodad,工程师则将doohickey放在产品本身开关上方的标签上。(顺便说一下,这些都是同一个事物的通用术语:whatchamacallit.) 术语管理系统的美妙之处在于,它可以帮助内容创建者(无论他们在哪个部门工作)理解,通用术语库既适合产品用户,也适合翻译团队,否则翻译团队会把混淆的东西带入目标语言材料。 混淆是一方面,额外的成本是另一方面。所用术语的不一致会减少可能从现有翻译中获得的重用或利用。总的来说,如果翻译人员能够快速、方便地获得认可的术语,翻译效率就会提高。 许多术语管理应用程序提供了一些功能,以确保可以通过插入定义、显示正确的用法或共享特定于客户、产品等的指令来保持一致性。 2.集中化 当然,内容创建者、翻译人员和不同的内部部门已经习惯于在各自的系统中运作,这就导致了上述的不一致性问题。因此,术语管理的另一个好处是,这些不同的利益相关者可以在用户权限/批准的情况下,对单一的中央术语库做出贡献,与之连接,并共享其资源。 当你和多个翻译团队一起工作时,你会意识到术语的集中化是标准化术语使用的方法。不足为奇的是,这有助于降低成本和提高效率:不用浪费更多的时间来确定是否批准使用一个术语,也不会因使用过时术语或不同翻译小组选择不同术语而造成昂贵的成本。 3.自动化 担心建立一个术语数据库会是一件费心费力的琐事?不用担心!由于术语管理系统中的自动化特性,从旧材料开始构建可靠的术语库。不必从头开始:只需导入以前翻译过的材料以及它们的源语言文档。 从已经开发的资源中,你可以相对轻松地提取、搜索、索引、分组和分类术语,以便在新项目中使用,或者更广泛地将其用作翻译管理工作流的集成部分,其中包括词汇表、翻译记忆库和风格指南。 同样,自动化可以帮助分析现有的源语言内容,并使用频率分析识别重复的源术语,以便使其包含在术语库中。当与双语数据一起使用时,相同的功能可以为任何新术语建议潜在的候选翻译。 4.一体化 使多语言术语井然有序的美妙之处来自于术语管理系统的能力,该系统可以通过与翻译工作流的其他基本工具集成来最大化其价值。 例如,自动检查器将验证翻译中使用的术语与术语库的一致性,并生成一个报告,该报告可用来轻松地预先确定潜在的错误。同样,术语系统应该允许与翻译管理系统或创作工具顺利集成。 5.角色和工作流程 有一个庞大的翻译或编辑团队来访问术语是很好的,但是如果没有一些健全的功能来为单个用户分配适当的角色,事情很容易陷入混乱。它应该考虑到各种角色,例如内容创建者,那些可以查询、建议、验证或更新特定术语的人,那些可以提供上下文或定义,导入或导出术语表的人,以及客户端和LSP端的广泛潜在用户。 因此,拥有一个健全的用户角色系统对于创建标准化的工作流是至关重要的,这些工作流可以应用到各个场景,例如: 由内容创建者或客户识别的新术语的术语验证过程 在翻译过程中由译者识别的新术语的术语确认过程 用于管理术语更改的流程,包括对已批准的遗留术语的管理更改 最后,术语管理系统应该支持两个与术语相关的ISO标准——ISO 10241(标准中的术语条目)和ISO 704(术语工作——原则和方法)。 6.元数据 这样的术语在没有上下文的情况下实际上是无用的。因此,一个好的术语管理系统应该提供一种简单的方法来管理与每个术语相关的特定元数据。这些元数据(例如状态、源、产品、项目、域、进入日期、历史记录和更改日期以及用户)对于翻译人员或术语审批者来说是至关重要的。它们使用户能够理解各个术语的上下文和历史,从而能够对术语的使用做出明智的决策,并执行高级术语库管理操作。 7.标准支持 术语管理系统不应该单独地工作。术语应该根据需要轻松地流入和流出术语库。为此,请关注对Term Base eXchange(TBX)等标准的支持,Term Base eXchange(TBX)是由ISO批准的,基于XML的开放式标准,用于交换结构化术语数据。接下来,寻找新的激动人心的发展,比如与XLIFF2.0术语表模块(通过TBX)的潜在互操作性。 8.面向未来 假设你的公司已经从将10个产品本地化为2种语言发展到将25个产品本地化为15种语言。想象一下你得为它们创建多少内容。 今天的术语管理系统可以随着因不同需求而产生内容的增加而发展。此外,最好的系统可以跟踪以任何形式显示的内容——无论是发往打印店的内容还是指向网站的内容。

以上中文文本为机器翻译,存在不同程度偏差和错误,请理解并参考英文原文阅读。

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