When you have an ongoing translation project, certain words are going to keep popping up in your content. Think industry terminology, branded language, product names and abbreviations – anything that makes a regular appearance in your project.
These words are important to your brand and you want to make sure they are translated 100% accurately and consistently every time they make an appearance. This is where terminology management helps you ensure that all the key words keep their intended meaning across every project.
What are the benefits of terminology management?
Above all, terminology management is about making sure your translations are accurate and consistent. By creating a list of key terminology, you can guarantee the same translations are used for the most common and important words in your content. This is particularly important for ongoing translation projects because it removes the risk of variation in how certain words are translated.
It also allows multiple translators to work on your projects without hurting consistency.
Terminology management is not only about accuracy and consistency, though – even if these are the priorities. It is also about creating a more efficient translation workflow and the fact you can have multiple translators working on the same project means you can already translate a larger volume of content, considerably faster.
The speed advantage grows even bigger once terminology management starts saving your translators from translating the same words over and over again. By cutting this out of the workflow, terminology management means you are able to do more while saving time and money.
Taking things further with translation memory
Terminology management was a manual process of creating and using glossaries until technology took things in another direction. Now we can almost entirely automate this process by using translation memory (TM), which automatically builds databases of translations – essentially a digital glossary that creates itself.
Better yet, translation memory automatically inserts these translations in content when they reappear, which pretty much automates the entire terminology management process.
Once again, this saves your translators from repeating the same translation but they do not even need to reuse existing translations manually. All of this is automated, which makes it faster and cheaper to achieve 100% accuracy and consistency across your entire translation project – no matter how much content there is to process.
Inconsistent translations can confuse your audience and reduce the credibility of your content. This is particularly dangerous with ongoing translation projects that could involve any number of translators and vast amounts of material. Terminology management cuts out these risks, giving you a guarantee that the same level of accuracy and consistency is present across all of your content. While translation memory can automate this to create a highly efficient translation process that gets results faster.
To find out more on how to improve the accuracy and consistency of your translation projects, get in touch with our team.