BIK Terminology—

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

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    Barbara Inge Karsch - Terminology Consulting and Training

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    Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, by Barbara Inge Karsch

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Archive for the ‘Interesting terms’ Category

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What do we do with terms?

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on September 23, 2010

We collect or extract terms. We research their underlying concepts. We document terms, and approve or fail them. We might research their target language equivalents. We distribute them and their terminological entries. We use them. Whatever you do with terms, don’t translate them.Microsoft Clip Art

A few years ago, Maria Theresa Cabré rightly criticized Microsoft Terminology Studio when a colleague showed it at a conference, because the UI tab for target language entries said “Term Translations.” And if you talk to Klaus-Dirk Schmitz about translating terminology, you will for sure be set straight. I am absolutely with my respected colleagues.

If we translate terms, why don’t we pay $.15 per term, as we do for translation work? At TKE in Dublin, Kara Warburton quoted a study conducted by Guy Champagne Inc. for the Canadian government in 2004. They found that between 4 and 6% of the words in a text need to be researched; on average, it takes about 20 min to research a term. That is why we can’t pay USD .15 per term.

Note also that we pay USD .15 per word and not per term. Terms are the signs that express the most complex ideas (concepts) in our technical documents. They carry a lot more meaning than the lexical units called words that connect them.

Let’s assume we are a buyer of translation and terminology services. Here is what we can expect:

.

Translation

Terminology work

Number of units a person can generally process per day

Ca. 2000 per day

Ca. 20 to 50 entries

Cost for the company

Ca. USD .25 per word

Ca. USD 55 per hour

Microsoft Clip ArtAt the end of the translation process, we have a translated text which in this form can only be used once. Of course, it might become part of a translation memory (TM) and be reused. But reuse can only happen, if the second product using the TM serves the same readership; if the purpose of the text is the same; if someone analyses the new source text with the correct TM, etc. And even then, it would be a good idea to proofread the outcome thoroughly.

The terminological entry, on the other hand, should be set up to serve the present purpose (e.g. support a translator during the translation of a particular project). But it might also be set up to allow a support engineer in a branch office to look up the definition of the target equivalent. Or it might enable a technical writer in another product unit to check on the correct and standardized spelling of the source term.

I am not sure that this distinction is clear to all translators who sell terminology services. You might get away with translating terms a few times. But eventually your client’s customers will indicate that there is something wrong, that the product is hard to understand or operate because it is not in their vernacular.

There are much more scientific reasons why we should not confuse translation and terminology work; while related and often (but not always) coincidental, these tasks have different objectives. More about that some other time. Today, let me appeal to you whose job it is to support clear and precise communication to reserve the verb “to translate” for the transfer of “textual substance in one language to create textual substance in another language” as Juan Sager puts it in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. If we can be precise in talking about our own field, we should do so.

Posted in Events, Interesting terms, Microsoft Terminology Studio, Researching terms, Setting up entries, Terminology of terminology | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

What I like about ISO 704

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on August 5, 2010

The body of ISO 704 “Terminology work—Principles and methods” lists a bunch of important information for terminology work. But what stuck in my mind is actually the annexes, most of all Annex B.

In the current version 704:2009, Annex B is devoted to term-formation methods. In other words, it gives us the most important methods that we have available when creating new terms or appellations in English. It also notes what might be obvious to us, i.e. that these methods differ from language to language. For German, for example, we now have the new Terminologiearbeit – Best Practices which the German terminology association, DTT, published recently and which is more systematic about this topic than a standard might be.

Comprehensiveness need not be the goal of 704; awareness of these methods is more important. If half the content publishers, PMs, branding or marketing folks that I worked with in the IT world had read those five short pages, it would have done a world of good. Instead, I have heard colleagues mocking terminologists who, when coining new terms, pull out the Duden (the main German-German dictionary, similar to The Webster’s or Le Petit Robert) to apply one of these methods. She who laughs last, laughs best, though: New terms and appellations that are well-motivated—either rooted in existing language or deliberately different—last. Quickly invented garbage causes misunderstandings and costs money.

Annex B doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, but it lists the most important methods that can be used in term formation. Here are the three main methods and some examples:Cairn from a recent hike in the Cascades, Barbara Inge Karsch

  • The first one is the creation of completely new lexical entities (terms or appellations), also known as neoterms. One way of creating a neoterm is through compounding, where a new designation is formed of two or more elements, for example cloud computing. 
  • Two methods that fall into the category of using existing forms are terminologization (see also How do I identify a term—terminologization) and transdisciplinary borrowing. An example of terminologization is cloud, where the everyday word cloud took on a very specific meaning in the context of computing, while the name of the computer virus Trojan horse was obviously borrowed from Greek mythology.
  • Translingual borrowing results in new terms and appellations that originate in another language. English climbing language, for example, is full of direct loans from a variety of other languages; just think of bergschrund, cairn or .

The above are just a few examples to give you an impression of what could be learned by reading Annex B. Incidentally, these are methods. They need to be applied correctly, not randomly. I can already hear it, “but I used transdisciplinary borrowing to come up with this [junk]”. No. Even if your orthopedist uses minimally-invasive arthroscopic surgery to fix your knee, you want him to be sure that you actually need surgery, right? If you need to coin English terms or appellations on a regular basis, Annex B of ISO 704 is worth your while. I also like Annex C. More about that some other time.

Posted in Coining terms, Content publisher, Interesting terms, Terminologist, Terminology methods | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Use and Misuse of Latin

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on July 8, 2010

Latin can be incredibly helpful in finding the correct target term for plants or animals. And it can be a nightmare for us terminologists, when people use it just because it sounds hip.Green bottle fly (Lucilia ceasar) by Ute Karsch

Experts in the field of biology, botany, zoology, etc., have the luxury of using Latin as their ‘universal translator,’ as a horticulturalist put it so aptly in the San Jose Mercury News. The following example shows how we in translation benefit from it: A translator working on a German text about, say, a Kaisergoldfliege, first needs to find the Latin equivalent. An online search will reveal that the Latin name is Lucilia ceasar, according to Linneus (who Oeser and Picht justly call the founder of terminology research in Hoffmann’s “Fachsprachen – Languages for Special Purposes”). It takes another online search to see that it is referred to as green bottle fly in English. A picture certainly helps to ascertain that it is the same animal.

This is the method that we planned to apply a few years ago, when the team responsible for the Microsoft game franchise Zoo Tycoon 2 approached the terminology team for help. Unfortunately, the project never came through. But we would have set up an entry for the common name and one for the scientific name and added a picture. That would have greatly enabled the target terminologists to find the correct equivalents in their language.

Oak spider (Aculapeira ceropegia) by Ute KarschLatin is not so helpful when it is used incorrectly to form new terms, and yet that is fairly common. A Microsoft team was looking to name a reporting tool that detects something and came up with the term “detectoid.” Anyone who went through five years of Latin (albeit grudgingly) and through a course on medical terminology (more happily) like myself will recognize -oid as the suffix for “resembling” or “like.” But the tool didn’t “resemble” anything; it just did detect. Anyone who encountered the term without explanation and who was familiar with the meaning of –oid, would have been distracted. Upon further research, I also found the following argument against it: The suffix is used in hacker jargon (see this wonderful entry in Foldoc). After that it was easy to argue against “detectoid”—no incorrect application of existing meaning, and no jargon, least of all hacker jargon!

Latin is a good tool for terminologists in many fields. Terminologists in scientific disciplines or our colleagues in medical informatics and ontology rely on its clarity all the time. If used incorrectly, it can lead to unclear source terminology and potentially even worse target terms. On that note—absit iniuria verbis, or “let injury be absent from (these) words.”

Posted in Coining terms, Interesting terms, Researching terms | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Dog food anyone?

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on May 27, 2010

Language is part of a company’s culture. Like other social groups, employees at a company develop a vernacular that allows them to communicate (efficiently) with each other, be specific enough, and maybe even have fun. Part of this language may be technical terms or jargon. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When employees of Microsoft use a product that hasn’t been released yet, the product is referred to as dog food and the practice is called dog-fooding. Apparently, the expression eating your own dog food was coined in 1988, and it is still in use today.

According to the best practices for terminology work just published by Deutscher Terminologie-Tag e.V. and Deutsches Institut für Terminologie, well-motivated, transparent terms allow the recipient of the communication to understand the concept (the idea represented by the term) immediately and comprehensively.

 From a term formation standpoint, dog food is not a well-motivated term: food for dogs and software products don’t have anything obvious in common, and we have to look to Wikipedia to understand the etymology. It also violates a few other criteria for good terms:

  • There was no other dog- or food-related terminology in use for related concepts, as far as we can tell today (usage).
  • Dog food has another meaning, although one could argue that the context allows the recipient to uniquely identify what the sender refers to in his communication (uniqueness).
  • Lack of ability to derive words of another part of speech from it; the verb “to dog-food” cannot seriously be considered a well derived verb (derivation).

We can only speculate why dog food as a designator for an unreleased product has taken root anyway:

  • It is easy to pronounce and to remember.
  • It works for the casual atmosphere of an innovation-driven software environment.
  • It may have been suggested and propagated by high-ranking employees.

This last point is an interesting one. If these high-ranking individuals used the term and used it consistently and often, caused people to chuckle or to listen up, they have a very good chance of succeeding even with a poorly motivated term. Sociolinguistic aspects, e.g. who coins and disseminates a term, do play a role in term formation.

Very likely frequency and vigor of use were the two aspects that were lacking when in November 2009 Microsoft CIO, Tony Scott, tried to convince Microsoft employees to use ice cream (and ice-creaming) instead of dog food. His intentions of changing to a term that is actually associated with something that people like to eat were good. But it was far too late.

It is very difficult to eradicate even a poorly motivated term, if it has been around for a while, people are used to it, and it has a certain weirdness factor to it. Not that ice creaming wasn’t weird: In fact, back when I, as Microsoft terminologist, read the story, I was screaming, too.

Posted in Interesting terms | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

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