Terminology is defined as all the terms and designations commonly used in a subject area. It is therefore the technical vocabulary, formed from the technical terms, which enables efficient technical communication in the first place and reflects your company’s expertise. 

What does terminology work mean and when should it be done? 

Since terminology work serves to build up sound technical terminology, it not only involves effort, but is also a complex business that should be started as early as possible. The later terminology work is introduced, the more time-consuming it is, because the old terminology used continues to grow. 

But why is that? Terminology work means the concept-oriented development, processing, storage and use of specific technical terms, which many different departments and specialist areas in your company are involved in and have to agree. After all, the results of terminology work have a major impact on almost all internal areas of a company, from design to production, from purchasing, marketing and sales to contract management, technical documentation and translation. 

In addition to the technical designation and the order and definition of the associated terms, terminology work is also about: 

• Internal and cross-company standardisation 
• Terminological definitions in the context of legal requirements (product liability, labour law, contract law, etc.) 
• Definition of company-specific product names (also for corporate identity maintenance) 
• Definition of designations for parts lists to avoid confusion and multiple stocking of spare parts etc. and to enable fast and accurate access to parts 
• Conversion of technical language into language suitable for consumers or users (technical documentation, advertising, etc.) 
• Adaptation of linguistic (and cultural) requirements for the globalisation or localisation of operations and documentation 

The terminology has been worked out – why do we need terminology management? 

Once the terminology has been defined, this does not necessarily mean that your various employees, such as marketing managers, technical writers, external service providers or translators, will use the terminology correctly. The second step in terminology management is to manage the terminology you have collected in such a way that your company can actually benefit from it.  

The advantages are obvious 

A well-designed terminology management system guarantees that the terminology work done can be used optimally through the sound management of the recorded and defined terminology. This results in numerous advantages and improvements, which not least also often lead to considerable cost savings. For example, products and services are clearly named in the service area, technical documentation is more comprehensible, translators spend less time on research and have fewer queries with the editor, internal company agreements are more effective due to significantly less misunderstanding, and even the training of new colleagues is easier. 

What does terminology management have to do with our translations? 

Your company is about products, processes and people, which are uniquely described by your special terminology, your corporate language. It is part of your corporate identity and deserves to be created, managed and delivered with professional methods and tools. At t’works, translators, terminologists, linguists, editors, copywriters, and language engineers work together to get your corporate language up and running professionally in a short time. We have developed tools and methods for this that are among the best on the market. We use linguistic technologies to capture the technical terminology relevant to you (“termcasting”) in the shortest possible time and make it available on request in our server-based terminology management system. In all required languages, of course. So that the whole world understands what it is all about: your products! 

Our solutions 

We extract, manage and maintain multilingual terminology and glossaries for consistent use in translation and business. These contain industry and company-specific technical terms, definitions and proper names. Terminology databases make subsequent translations more consistent, faster and ultimately cheaper. 

Our specially developed online terminology solutions ez:term and tf-term on the company intranet or Internet provide support in this respect.  

We look forward to being able to advise you.