This has been an exciting month for language technology folks, first with the initial beta release of the My Glossary feature at TermWiki.com, which is a free online tool that enables freelance translators, technical writers and other glossary owners to store, translate, develop, share, and perfect their own personal glossaries online—all in a real-time, collaborative environment.

This month also brought TermWiki’s first Galaxy Pad Contest to an official close. In the contest, translators, technical writers, and other developers of multilingual content were invited to enter terms and translations into TermWiki’s master termbase, and the person who entered the most terms would win a free Samsung Galaxy Pad. After a fierce competition, Cristina Fernández—a professional translator from Spain—ended up taking the prize after entering and translating over 10,000 terms!

The cool thing was, Cristina didn’t even know there was a contest going on—she just entered 10,000 terms of her own accord. What possessed Cristina to manage her glossaries like a crazed logophile? Check out this exclusive interview with the winner of the 2010 TermWiki Galaxy Pad Contest to find out! (And congratulations, Cristina!)

Guest blog entry by Carl Yao, TermWiki Masta’ and the Vice President of Global Strategy at CSOFT

The DITA Europe 2010 Conference was held in Vienna, the scenic home of Mozart, and I simply can’t imagine a better location to meet up and talk shop. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) Conference is a biannual convention organized by CIDM (the Center for Information-Development Management) that draws content professionals and CMS enthusiasts from around the world to share XML publishing experience, best practices, and showcase cutting-edge CMS technology. As a set of standards for developing content, DITA itself enables companies to develop and publish content with better reuse, consistency, faster document creation and overall reduced translation costs.

When I arrived at Vienna International Airport, there was an incredibly dense layer of fog that only allowed for about 30 meters of visibility on all sides (you’ve got to admire the bravery of those Lufthansa pilots, because weather conditions like that would’ve caused major traffic delays in the US and other parts of the world). The sky quickly cleared up, however, and I was pleasantly surprised to meet a warm November sun that, according to locals, was completely out of the ordinary for this time of year in Austria.

As I made my way into the city, something happened that immediately impressed on me the importance of the conference. I had hailed a cab and told the driver that I wanted to go downtown. He just looked at me with a surprised expression on his face, indicating that he didn’t speak any English. It made me smile, because I’m constantly reminded in small ways that translation and localization services are still very much in demand in today’s multilingual world. Though not necessarily related to XML publishing and content management, this little event made me all the more confident that CSOFT’s globalization business will continue to fly high. Luckily enough, the resourceful cab driver pulled up to a pedestrian couple and asked how to translate “the place where all the tourists go.”

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

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More on Terminology Management:

When talking about terminology management, a lot of emphasis is placed on managing terms in a multilingual context. While this is an important step in ensuring quality translations and consistent branding abroad, people tend to overlook the fact that terminology management is most efficacious when applied as a preventive measure early on in the source-authoring stage of a product’s development cycle.

In a single organization, many departments contribute to the different forms of written communication that accompany a product. Regardless of the type of product, it’s not uncommon to have anywhere from four to ten operative groups from different offices around the world writing content simultaneously. Without a glossary in place to guide the development of this content, you run the risk of different terms being applied to the same concept.

Now, to most people, this doesn’t really sound like a big deal. But consider this: Your organization develops an electronic device with a brand new, never-before-seen function. Your hardware engineers decide to use Term A to refer to this function on the device’s LCD screen, whereas your software engineers use Term B to label this function in related software UI strings. At the same time, your technical writers, who are working on writing the Help menus, user manuals, and training documents, etc., use Term C to refer to the same function. And then your marketing team uses Term D to, yet again, refer to the exact same concept.

What’s your customer going to think when he buys the device on account of Term D, but then has a problem with Term A on the device itself, because it doesn’t match Term B in the accompanying software, so he looks in the Help menu only to find that Term A and B are alternately referred to as Term C? He’s going to throw your product out the window and pray that someone drives over it with their car.

Yes, mixing up your terminology is that confusing to the end-user. And yes, this type of inconsistency affects the quality of your branding and adds significant costs in terms of post-sales support, re-printing, levied fines for refused shipments, and the list goes on.

So be sure and manage your terms from the source, folks—and do it early on in the product development cycle, ideally before source-authoring even begins. It’ll save you a lot of hassle, a lot of time, and a lot of money in the long run, especially when you decide to localize your content into several dozen languages.

If you’re interested in reading more about the benefits of terminology management, check out this article that details 10 Good Reasons to Manage Your Terminology. Alternatively, check out TermWiki.com, where you can sign up for a free account and start managing your multilingual glossaries right away.

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Issue Seven 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:

When dealing with auditors, it never hurts to be precise. For that matter, it’s best to be precise in all aspects of your business, especially if you’re working in highly regulated sectors, like pharmaceuticals, biotech, or medical devices. TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, enables you to bring a new degree of precision to your product documentation by providing a one-stop platform for the collaborative terminology development, management, translation, and dissemination processes. When it comes to the Life Sciences, there’s no room for error when the international compliance of your product is on the line—just ask your auditors. Better yet, ask your friendly neighborhood LSP.

• Test drive TermWiki yourself at TermWiki.com.
• Click here to read “10 Good Reasons to Manage Your Terminology.”
• Check out more detailed information on TermWiki.

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Issue Six 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:

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, was developed with MediaWiki software, which, unlike the development platforms of other terminology management systems on the market, is especially open in terms of infrastructure—and thus highly customizable.

Every organization manages their terminology differently, and because of that, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. With TermWiki, you don’t have to worry about getting “locked in” by rigid software that forces you to adapt your workflow to the limitations of the system. There are currently tens-of-thousands of extensions available for MediaWiki software, a testament to the fact that this PHP-based application can be easily tweaked and prodded to meet your individual terminology management needs—and it’s not going to cost you an arm and a leg.

Check out www.TermWiki.com for a free test drive.

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Issue Five 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:

It’s no joke—we love talking data categories (which, admittedly, has never made us cool at parties). The fact of the matter is, the way in which you manage terminological attributes in your glossary has a direct effect on the usefulness, consistency, scalability, and integrability of your multilingual termbase. When looking for the right terminology management system for your organization, you should pay attention to how new data is entered and what measures are in place to minimize human error.

In traditional terminology management models, you generally have one of two options for entering new records. The most common way is to create entries outside of the terminology management system in a spreadsheet application. This is all well and good, but the problem with spreadsheets (aside from complete lack of traceability) is that they don’t enable you to avail yourself of “pick lists,” or drop-down menus with finite values for a given data category.

Without pick lists, the terminologist (or translator, project manager, etc.) has to enter data manually, which is less efficient, and which also paves the way for introducing human error. For example, if someone simply misspells a data category, then you are going to encounter problems when you go to import, convert, or migrate your terminological data to another system.

The other method of adding new terms and translations is to enter them directly into a terminology management system. As long as the system has an intuitive interface, users can take advantage of the productivity gains inherent in pick lists and ensure the consistency of the data they enter. Consistent data is key to producing a versatile glossary, because it’s absent of any variables that might otherwise muck up your import, conversion, or integration processes.

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, enables you to define data categories and pick lists in a manner that best suits your content management needs. Because TermWiki is hosted online with a centralized database, any updates to data categories are automatically implemented throughout your entire glossary to ensure consistency between terms and across languages. So whether you’re managing a hundred terms or a million, TermWiki’s intuitive, standardized user interface will help ensure that no term ever goes astray.

• Click here for more detailed information on TermWiki.
• Test drive TermWiki yourself at TermWiki.com.
• Learn more about terminology management.

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Guest blog entry by Jasmine Liu, Business Development Manager at CSOFT.

A few weeks back I dropped my iPhone 3GS and cracked the glass. And I mean really cracked it. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t get a new phone until next January so, in the meantime, I’ve still got to make do with my Frankenstein phone.

In order to keep from cutting myself every time I thumb through my apps, I taped a giant piece of anti-glare film over the glass. It’s frustrating to see all my precious little applications living behind a terrible-looking screen—and it’s really difficult to navigate. But I can still use it and—in a typical deranged Apple-fan fashion—I’m just happy that I still have my iPhone, in spite of its not being pretty anymore.

Seeing as I’d rather tape my iPhone up like an electronic mummy than exchange it for something else, it’s clear that I’ve got a bit of an addiction. And it’s not an addiction that’s limited to Americans alone. A lot of iPhone App developers are turning to localization as a strategy to further increase their sales abroad, a sign that foreign consumers also suffer an unhealthy dependence on their beloved apps.

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.

Keep up with Terminus and his multilingual shenanigans by  subscribing to our RSS feed!

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

Issue Three 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:

Open discussion channels between translators and reviewers are essential to the overall quality of your organization’s in-country and/or outsourced review cycle. Not only that, but a mechanism that promotes remote collaboration is essential to closing the gap between the different functional groups and employees around the world who are involved in the development of your glossary at the source.

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, comes with embedded, term-specific discussion panels to help keep terminology- and translation-related disputes organized and relevant to the topic at hand. All authorized users can freely discuss their opinions and address term-specific concerns in a structured, completely traceable platform.

• 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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