A note from the series editors
If you’ve been following the localization strand from the beginning, you’ve now covered a significant stretch of territory. You understand the difference between translation and localization, why your writing habits shape translation costs, how controlled language disciplines your source, how files move through engineering pipelines, how translation management systems orchestrate the workflow, and, most recently, how translation memory turns your consistent writing into a compounding financial asset.
Every one of those posts has pointed, in some way, toward the same destination: the words themselves. Not just any words, but the right ones, used consistently, governed deliberately, and understood the same way by every person and every system that encounters them. That destination has a name: terminology management.
Terminology management: Pastures new for technical communicators
Firehead partner Jerry Bartlett of ContentProTech Ltd, is an experienced terminologist who contributed a few thoughts from his own experience:
There’s an old story I heard from a former localization colleague. He told me that he once read a German software manual. The instruction was to: “Enter your details in the pasture, below”. It pointed to the original author writing in English, and meaning “Enter your details in the field, below”, but somehow, back and forth between this language pair, the “field” had become “pasture”.
The story might be apocryphal but it illustrates how easy it can be to get into difficulty when a documentation set covers more than one language, and contributions can come from authors of different working knowledge of the language. This is when your writers and editors need to know when a spade is a spade, and when it is a pneumatic shovel.
Terminology management is vital. Glossaries are all well and good, but they are often not universal across a product’s documentation. And then there is the danger of other, possibly siloed, content in dictionaries that are for marketing or sales. How does the copywriter know how an engineering term should be used? How should a technical communicator use branding phrases? English, with so many synonyms, can be confusing.
The step up from a glossary is keeping the terms in an Excel sheet. You might start with the parent language on the left column and then a column for each language you are translating to. But it can soon start to get unwieldy. I was called into a project where the list of terms ran to 13,000 rows on an Excel spreadsheet and 38 languages, with separate but adjacent columns for Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. On one occasion, several hundred terms in Simplified Chinese were accidentally deleted. Chaos ensued.
That project had already recognised the need for managing the terms in a terminology database – a termbase. It was my job to design and build it, starting from the spreadsheet, so that the terms could be used as part of a wider project to transfer all documentation to translation memory – the central tool of localization workflow, and the means by which companies only have to translate new text when a document is updated.
Once you have translation memory and a termbase that is connected to it you at last have control over your terms and it becomes easy to govern and manage them. Or at least, it becomes possible!
There is also a financial upside to doing this. I heard that the translation cost saving in the first quarter, when my project was completed, was of the order of hundreds of thousands of Euros.
Why Terminology Management Gets Three Posts
You might be asking yourself: Why does terminology get three posts when most topics in this Skills for Modern Technical Communicators series fit naturally into an (admittedly long) single post?
Terminology management just doesn’t work like that, and the reason is not that it’s especially complicated. It operates at three distinct levels that build on each other, and collapsing them into one post would do you a disservice if you want to act on what you learn.
- The first level is conceptual
Understanding what terminology management actually is, and why it is not the same thing as having a glossary. Many organizations have glossaries. Very few have terminology management. The gap between those two things is where inconsistency, translation cost, and localization failures hide. - The second level is practical
How you actually build and govern your terms, which tools and formats are involved, how the workflow connects to translation memory and CAT tools, and what the technical communicator’s role is in keeping the system healthy over time. - The third level is strategic
How you make the case for terminology management in an organization that does not yet have it, how you manage the human and political dimensions of implementation, and what a successful rollout actually looks like. This is where most terminology initiatives either take hold or quietly fail, and it is where real-world practitioner experience is irreplaceable.
That’s why this mini-series runs across three posts. Each one is self-contained and readable on its own, and together, they’ll give you the complete picture.
KOS and terminology management share a lot
Terminology management is, in one sense, KOS applied to language: the practice of deciding which words represent which concepts, governing those decisions, and making them available to everyone who needs them, including translation systems.
If you read the KOS strand previously this year, you already understand why a term is not just a word. You understand the difference between a label and a concept, between a preferred term and an acceptable synonym, between a definition that serves internal clarity and one that survives translation into another language. Those distinctions will reappear in the posts ahead, and the KOS framework will help them land more quickly.
If you didn’t read the KOS strand, don’t worry. Each of these posts is written to stand on its own. But if the terminology management posts spark your interest in the deeper knowledge architecture underneath, the KOS strand is waiting for you.
What we’ll cover
Post 8: From Glossary to Governance — What Terminology Management Really Is
The conceptual foundation. We examine what distinguishes a managed termbase from an ad hoc glossary, why the difference matters for localization quality and cost, and what the technical communicator’s role as a terminology steward actually looks like. This post also introduces the key vocabulary of the field: termbase, translation unit, preferred term, forbidden term, concept, and the standards that govern how they are recorded.
Post 9: Building Your Termbase — Design, Tools, and Workflow
The practical layer. We cover how to design a termbase that works in practice, which tools and formats are involved (including TBX, the open standard for termbase exchange), how the termbase connects to your CAT tool and translation memory, and what ongoing governance looks like. Real-world tooling choices across different organizational sizes are included here.
Post 10: Making It Stick — The Business Case and Organizational Rollout
The strategic layer, and the one with the most practitioner depth. We cover how to make the case for terminology management investment, how to manage the human dimensions of rollout, and what distinguishes the initiatives that take hold from the ones that quietly stall. A full case study, drawn from real implementation experience, runs through this post.
Ready When You Are
If you’re reading this as a working technical communicator who has wondered why your organization’s translation costs keep rising despite everyone’s best efforts, this is a good place to start looking for answers.
If you want to strengthen the foundational skills that terminology management builds on, the Firehead Training Academy has courses across the technical communication competencies that support this work.
Browse what is currently available at the Firehead Training Academy.
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