Issue Four of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

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More information:

Your corporate glossary should ideally be available to all of the functional groups in your organization that simultaneously produce written content. This way, you can ensure that every department uses key terms consistently both within and across documents.

In order to make sure that your company’s glossary is compatible with each group’s content management systems (CMS), computer-aided translation (CAT) tools, knowledge bases and other language-related technology, it’s best to invest in a versatile terminology management system that can both import and export multilingual files in variety of different formats.

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, enables you to import and export glossaries in any number of formats, including XLIFF, TBX, XML, CSV and Multiterm. Not only does this maximize the compatibility of your translation glossary with other tools, it also ensures that you won’t ever be locked into using any one system.

• Click here for more detailed information on TermWiki.
• Test drive TermWiki yourself at TermWiki.com.
• Find the right terminology management system for your organization.

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What’s that? It’s Wednesday again? Well I’ll be darned: it’s time for Wacky Word Wednesdays, a weekly celebration of some of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world.

Today’s wacky word is: jiggery-pokery.

The definition from Dictionary.com:

jig·ger·y-pok·er·y [jig-uh-ree-poh-kuh-ree] -noun Chiefly British 1. trickery, hocus-pocus; fraud; humbug. 2. sly, underhanded action.

It comes from a combination of the Scottish words jouk, referring to an elusive movement (like ducking or dodging), and pawk, meaning “to trick.” Naturally, you need to add the English suffix -ery, which denotes the collective quality of a given noun or action. Now throw in a couple centuries of phonological change, and “joukery-pawkery” becomes the much-loved and sadly underused jigger-pokery.

Why did we choose this word for Wacky Word Wednesdays? Simply because it’s fun to say—it practically dances off the tongue. Not only that, but it sounds a thousand times better in a fake British accent!

Guest blog entry by Robert Derbyshire, Technical Writer and TermWiki Commandant.

Everyone is well used to criticizing English speakers for their awful foreign language skills. I remember speaking to a guy from Norway a few years ago about the languages he studied at school. He said Swedish, German and French. I asked him “what about English?” He replied in passing, “Oh, we’re expected to be fluent in that by middle school.”

He failed to mention that they were expected to be fluent in a foreign language by age of 15. In the UK, foreign languages have been in retreat for years. Six years ago, after the government made language study optional after age 14, language uptake at GCSE level (age 15-16) has dropped by a third.

While I’d love to flex my British blogging wings and have a good old moan about life, the universe and everything, for the moment I’d like to explore some of the unusual moral dilemmas that an English native speaker faces when he or she actually decides to walk upstream and try to learn a foreign language.

Welcome back to the fourth and final entry of Translation Review Week. So far we’ve talked about the what’s, the how’s, and the who’s of translation review. Today’s topic is tools and technology, with a focus on how the various gizmos and documents at your disposal can help secure the successful execution of your translation review cycle.

First, we would like to talk about the various reference documents that you should provide to your translators and reviewers in order to guarantee their common alignment with your organization’s products, branding, messaging, and overall communication style.

At a minimum, you should work with your language service provider to prepare the following documents/knowledge base material that will go a long way toward establishing an effective, stress-free translation review process:

• Language-specific translation style guides
• Approved multilingual glossaries
• Source documents
• Approved Translation Memory
• Relevant product knowledge/specifications
• Relevant target market/audience information

Welcome back to part three of Translation Review Week! So far we’ve talked about knowing what you want and getting what you want—two integral steps in ensuring the success of your translation review process.

From these discussions, we’ve gleaned that working with your language service provider to set specific parameters for reviewers based on your own understanding of your organization’s documents and their respective functions is the best way to facilitate an efficacious, stress-free translation review cycle. In addition, we’ve established that respecting the review process as an imperative quality assurance measure (by giving your reviewers sufficient time to work and getting them involved in a project early on) will also help to abate review-induced grey hair syndrome.

So we’ve talked about what’s and we’ve talked about how’s. Today’s topic is whom you should employ to perform translation review—getting the right people on board. We call it “The Who” of Translation Review.

(Thanks to Jim Summaria and Wikimedia Commons for this rad picture of the Who.)

It’s that time again! We’re taking a quick break from Translation Review Week for another edition of Wacky Word Wednesdays, a weekly celebration of some of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world.

Today’s wacky word is: defenestration.

The definition from Dictionary.com:

de·fen·es·tra·tion [dee-fen-uh-strey-shuhn] -noun the act of throwing a thing or esp. a person out of a window

It comes from a combination of the Latin prefix de- (meaning down from, off, or implying removal) and fenestra (meaning window). It can also be used in its verb form, defenestrate, but because it’s a transitive verb, it needs to be paired with an object.

This word comes with a story, actually. According to Broken Secrets, the blog about interesting things you don’t know yet, “The First Defenestration of Prague occurred on July 30, 1419 when a priest led his congregation on a protest through the streets of Prague. At the town hall, someone in a high window threw a rock at the priest. The people were enraged and stormed the town hall. They defenestrated the mayor, the town judge and thirteen members of the town council.”