Abstract
The internationalization of economy has become a major focus in the world today. Different tasks can be carried out for the sake of internationalization, such as corporate terminology management, which ensures that the correct terms are consistently used within the company, in line with set goals. However, many enterprises do not invest in managing their terminology, which can lead to a wide range of problems. This chapter describes a general framework for managing terminology in commercial settings. The steps include (1) corpus preparation and compilation, (2) term extraction, (3) conceptual analysis, (4) identification of equivalents, and (5) representation and storage in terminology management systems. The results showed that corporate terminology management is viable, thanks to this procedure, which obviously benefits from the participation of a linguist.
TopTerminology Management
Terminology management aims at ensuring that the correct terms are used consistently throughout a company, an organization, or a translation or terminology project. As for business and corporations, terminology management has a positive impact on their internationalization strategy. Its benefits range from effective communication to the reinforcement of the brand name, as well as improved translations, cost reduction, and enhancement of customer relations, among many others (Bowker 2015; Cerrella Bauer 2015). Warburton (2015) also adds that terminology management improves content retrievability in search engines and facilitates the use of content management systems. She also highlights the advantages of terminology management systems for almost any natural language processing system (Warburton 2015: 366-367).
In contrast, failure to manage terminology could hinder communication, create confusion, damage a company’s image, lower translator productivity, or even result in legal issues (Bowker 2015: 306). For instance, the lack of terminology management could result in the use of terms that are not promoted by the company (e.g., terms that hinder information retrieval or do not convey the brand name and corporate image) as well as cause term inconsistencies (e.g., variable capitalization or hyphenation). However, many enterprises do not invest in managing their terminology (Cerrella Bauer 2015; Warburton 2015). Most often, staff and managers may not understand what terminology management involves, and thus not acknowledge the need to implement it (Cerrella Bauer 2015: 326). Increasingly, the good business sense of managing terminology is illustrated in different studies, which investigate the time invested in term record creation in comparison to the time devoted to term searches during translation (Champagne 2004), or compare the costs of creating term records with the consequences of not doing so (Childress 2007), among other aspects.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Corpus Analysis Tool: Software that allows users to explore how language works by analyzing authentic texts.
Corpus: Collection of texts that are selected according to specific criteria and constitutes a language sample.
Termbase: Database containing terminology and related information.
Semantic Relation: Meaningful link between concepts.
Terminology Management: Process of identifying, storing, and managing terminology specific to a project, a company, a product, etc.
Knowledge Pattern: Expression or discursive structure that reveals one or several semantic relations.
Regular Expression: Sequence of characters that define a search pattern in order to match a desired, specific result.