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 ‘Tool’ Category

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Quantity matters

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on August 19, 2010

Losing a terminologist position because the terminologist couldn’t show any quantitative progress is shocking. But it happened, according to a participant of the TKE conference that just concluded in Dublin. While managing terminology is a quality measure, quantity must not be disregarded. After all, a company or organization isn’t in it for the fun of it. Here are numbers that three teams established in different types of databases.

At J.D. Edwards, quality was a big driving factor. Each conceptual entry passed through a three-step workflow before it was approved. The need for change management was extremely low, but the upfront investment was high. Seven full-time terminologists who worked 1/3 of their time on English entries, 1/3 of their time on entries in their native language and 1/3 of the time on other projects, produced just below 6000 conceptual entries between 1999 and 2003.

In comparison, the Microsoft terminology database contained 9000 concepts in January of 2005, most of them (64%) not yet released (for more details see this article in the German publication eDITion). The team of five full-time English terminologists, who spent roughly 50% of their time on terminology work, increased the volume to about 30,000 in the five following years, 95% of which were released entries. The quality of the entries was not as high at JDE, and there was less complex metadata available (e.g. no concept relations).

Rikstermbanken According to Henrik Nilsson, at Swedish Centre for Terminology, TNC, three fulltime resources built up a terminology database, the Risktermbanken,  with 67.000 conceptual entries in three years. That seems like a large number. But one has to take into consideration that the team consolidated data from many different sources in a more or less automated fashion. The entries have not been harmonized, as one of the goals was to show the redundancy of work between participating institutions. The structure of the entries is deliberately simple.

The needs that these databases serve is different: In a corporation, solid entries that serve as prescriptive reference for the product releases are vital. Entries in a collection from various sources, such as in national terminology banks, serve to support the public and public institutions. They may not be harmonized yet, but contain a lot of different terminology for different users. And they may not be prescriptive.

As terminologists, we are sometimes very focused on quality. But let’s not forget that eventually someone will want to hear what has been accomplished by a project. The number of entries is one of the easiest way to communicate that to a business person.

Posted in J.D. Edwards TDB, Microsoft Terminology Studio, Producing quantity, Return on investment, Rikstermbanken | Tagged: , | 5 Comments »

ISO 12620—Why bother

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on July 22, 2010

Standards are nice, but they don’t do anything for you or, more importantly, the user of your terminology database, if you are the only one applying them. But how do you get a large virtual team of terminologists or language specialists to agree on and apply standards, such as ISO 12620, to database entries? And first: Why bother climbing such a mountain?

Machapuchare by Birgit KarschImagine you have a large document to author or translate. Your client gave you a dictionary to use. Because you are not sure of the meaning or usage of 50 terms, you look them up. But the dictionary holds you up more than anything: One entry contains a definition, the next one doesn’t; one provides context, but it is in a language you don’t understand; most terms make sense, but several of them are cryptic and the entry doesn’t provide clarity. If your client hadn’t insisted that you use the dictionary, you wouldn’t: It just slows you down.

The objective of a terminology database is to have consistent and correct terminology used in the product, in source as well as in target languages. To support that goal, users must be able to use a database entry quickly and easily—structure really helps here. Furthermore, users must be able to trust the information provided—transparent, clear and consistent entries create trust.

Ideally, you have a centralized team of trained terminologists who know the standards inside out and apply them religiously. If you don’t, select/create a tool that supports standards adherence as much as possible. Some simple examples: If definition is mandatory, automatically enforce it; if the term is a verb, hide the Number field; if the language is English, hide the Gender field. Tools can do a lot, but your team very likely still needs a standard.

The Microsoft terminology team did. Simply handing a standards document off to the team had not been successful in the past—nobody could remember it, many entries therefore contained unstructured, if not incorrect information, and there was no incentive to adhere to standards. A more collaborative effort was called for: Together, in-house terminologists went through data categories one by one. Because we were a virtual team, e-mail was the best form of communication. Each data category was dealt with in one e-mail that contained: the definition, a scenario and voting buttons that allowed the team to agree with the meaning or disagree and make a better suggestion. Team members could participate in the voting, but they didn’t have to. However, anyone knew from the beginning that they had to accept the outcome, regardless of whether they participated or not. Annapurna South by Birgit KarschAfter the new guide had been published, measurements were carried out and documented in a quarterly report. Terminologists then set their own deadlines for cleaning up entries to comply with the standards.

ISO 12620 doesn’t just enable data exchange, as we saw in last week’s entry. At J.D. Edwards and Microsoft, it also helped create standards guides. I am sure not every field is filled in correctly; perfection is not the point. But with shrinking budgets and tighter deadlines, a database that could cost millions of dollars must support the user as best as possible in their endeavor to create reliable communication. A standards guide based on an international standard is a good tool you can use to climb that mountain.

Posted in Content publisher, Microsoft Terminology Studio, Standardizing entries, Terminologist, Terminology 101 | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

The Year of Standards

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on July 16, 2010

LISA The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) reminded us in their recent Globalization Insider that they had declared 2010 the ‘Year of Standards.’ It resonates with me because socializing standards was one of the objectives that I set for this blog. Standards and standardization are the essence of terminology management, and yet practitioners either don’t know of standards, don’t have time to read them, or think they can do without them. In the following weeks, as the ISO Technical Committee 37 ("Terminology and other language and content resources") is gearing up for the annual meeting in Dublin, I’d like to focus on standards. Let’s start with ISO 12620.

ISO 12620:1999 (Computer applications in terminology—Data categories—Part 2: Data category registry) provides standardized data categories (DCs) for terminology databases; a data category is the name of the database field, as it were, its definition, and its ID. Did everyone notice that terminology can now be downloaded from the Microsoft Language Portal? One of the reasons why you can download the terminology today and use it in your own terminology database is ISO 12620. The availability of such a tremendous asset is a major argument in favor of standards.

I remember when my manager at J.D. Edwards slapped 12620 on the table and we started the selection process for TDB. It can be quite overwhelming. But I turned into a big fan of 12620 very quickly: It allowed us to design a database that met our needs at J.D. Edwards.

When I joined Microsoft in 2004, my colleagues had already selected data categories for a MultiTerm database. Since I was familiar with 12620, it did not take much time to be at home in the new database. We reviewed and simplified the DCs over the years, because certain data categories chosen initially were not used often enough to warrant their existence. One example is ‘animacy,’ which is defined in 12620 as “[t]he characteristic of a word indicating that in a given discourse community, its referent is considered to be alive or to possess a quality of volition or consciousness”…most of the things documented in Term Studio are dead and have no will or consciousness. But we could simply remove ‘animacy’, while it would have been difficult or costly to integrate a new data category late in the game. If you are designing a terminology database, err on the side of being more comprehensive. Because we relied on 12620, it was easy when earlier in 2010 we prepared for making data exportable into a TBX format (ISO 30042). The alignment was already there, and communication with the vendor, an expert in TBX, was easy.

ISO 12620:1999 has since been retired and was succeeded by ISO 12620:2009, which “provides guidelines […] forISOcat creating, selecting and maintaining data categories, as well as an interchange format for representing them.” The data categories themselves were moved into the ISOcat “Data Category Registry” open to use by anyone.

ISO 12620 or now the Data Category Registry allows terminology database designers to apply tried and true standards rather than reinventing the wheel. As all standards, they enable quick adoption by those familiar with them and they enable data sharing (e.g. in large term banks, such as the EuroTermBank). If you are not familiar with standards, read A Standards Primer written by Christine Bucher for LISA. It is a fantastic overview that helps navigate the standardization maze.

Posted in Advanced terminology topics, Designing a terminology database, EuroTermBank, J.D. Edwards TDB, Microsoft Language Portal, Microsoft Terminology Studio, Terminologist | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

How do I identify a term—system

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on June 30, 2010

Here is one that is forgotten often in fast-paced, high-production environments: system. This at first glance cryptic criterion refers to terms that may not be part of our text or our list of term candidates, but that are part of the conceptual system that makes up the subject matter we are working in. And sometimes, if not to say almost always, it pays off to be systematic.

A very quick excursion into the theory of terminology management: We distinguish between ad-hoc and systematic terminology work.

  • When we work ad-hoc, we don’t care about the surrounding concepts or terms; we focus on solving the terminological problem at hand; for example: I need to know what forecasting is and what it is called in Finnish.
  • When we take a systematic approach, we go deeper into understanding a particular subject. We may start out researching one term (e.g. forecasting) and understand the concept behind it, but then we continue to study its parent, sibling and child concepts; we work in a subject area and examine and document the relationships of the concepts.

In the following example, the terminologist decided to not only set up an entry for forecasting, but to also list different types of forecasting—child or subordinate concepts—and the parent or superordinate concept. The J.D. Edwards terminology tool, TDB, had an add-on that turned the data into visuals, such as the one below. It goes without saying that displays of this nature help, for instance, the Finnish terminologist to find equivalents more easily when s/he knows that besides qualitative forecasting there is also quantitative forecasting, etc.

JDE types of forecasting

In his Manuel pratique de terminologie, Dubuc suggests that ad-hoc terminology work is a good way to get started with terminology management. Furthermore, he is right in that documenting concepts and their systems takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in many business environments. On the other hand, a more systematic approach will, in my experience, lead to entries that stand the test of time longer, create less downstream problems or questions, and need less maintenance. So, investing more time in the initial research and setting the surrounding concepts while you have the information at hand anyway, may very well pay off later. Seasoned terminologists know when to include terms to flesh out a system and when to simply answer an ad-hoc question.

Posted in Advanced terminology topics, Content publisher, J.D. Edwards TDB, Selecting terms, Terminologist, Terminology 101 | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

How do I identify a term—frequency and distribution

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on June 27, 2010

A seemingly obvious criterion to select terms for a terminology database is frequency of occurrence. A term extraction program, for example, should tell us how often a term appears in the text mined. Term extraction output or other text-mining solutions might also tell you what the distribution of a term is, in other words you may be able to find out in how many documents or products a term occurs.

When sifting through term candidates in term-mining output, we very likely have to scope quite a bit, because we can’t spend weeks on making perfect term selections. As we know by now, frequency is not the only term selection criteria, but it can help us particularly in large projects. Here are options and their pros and cons:

Pros

Cons

Recommendation

Ignore frequency and evaluate all term candidates

More precise selection because nothing is excluded

High time investment

Good for small lists; never completely ignore frequency, as it can still tell us something about the importance of a term

Exclude all terms that occur less than x number of times

Number of term candidates is smaller

Potential to miss critical terms

Good for larger lists and when a critical percentage of terms was already extracted manually

Exclude all terms that occur more than y number of times

Number of term candidates is smaller

Potential to miss critical terms

Good for large lists from which existing database or other non-critical terms or words were not excluded

Only go through terms that occur more than x and less than y

Number of terms can be reduced significantly

High potential to miss critical terms

Good when both critical terms are already extracted and no stop word list was used

If a term occurs often in a project, it is probably either very important or so generic that it shouldn’t be included. If you run a term extraction process, words should not be part of the resulting list; they should be part of a stop-word list.

Certain term mining solutions or lookup tools also indicate in which project or in which version and product a particular term is used. In other words, they give us information about the distribution of a term. But high distribution, just like high frequency, may be criteria of terms that are very well known and do not need to be documented. For example, at Microsoft it would seem useless to include terms, such as computer or user, just because they occur frequently and are widely distributed. There are other reasons to include them, though. By the same token, a widely-distributed and highly-frequent term that is somewhat mysterious should be included in the terminology database, as many users might need to look it up and the return on investment is there.

To summarize, frequency and distribution are important term selection criteria. They must be looked at in combination with other criteria, though, to make sense. One criterion to consider could be novelty, which we will examine in the following entry.

Posted in Content publisher, Selecting terms, Term extraction tool, Terminologist, Terminology 101 | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Terminological Scatterlings*

Posted by Barbara Inge Karsch on June 10, 2010

While it is hard to avoid soccer these days—not that I, who enjoyed the Sommermärchen (the fabulous atmosphere) in Germany four years ago, would want to—, it is not hard to link South Africa, soccer and terminology. So, let me leave corporate terminology management behind for this posting and talk a bit about South Africa from a language and terminology point-of-view.

South African Sunset by Eunjung Choi Let’s start with South African English. If you visit this beautiful country, you will very likely notice that ’just now’ “denotes varying levels of urgency. Phoning someone ‘now now’ is sooner than ‘now’ or ‘just now’ but not as soon as ‘right now’” according to this short glossary of South Africanisms.

In their latest blog, ‘South African World Cup Draws Multilingual Audiences’, Common Sense Advisory talks about the language industry benefitting from the World Cup, which is not a surprise: Large international events always are. I fondly remember my time at the Atlanta Olympics with hundreds of other interpreters. I worked for overtired German journalists, who would normally get away without an interpreter, but long hours and the Southern accent incapacitated them. Back then, I had put together my own glossary of sports terminology. For the World Cup, we don’t need to: CLS Communication just released a multilingual World Cup dictionary in five European languages. I never knew that “Goal” is used in Swiss German. I am sure you’ll find other little surprises in the CLS Football Dictionary. Speaking of football, former Microsoft colleague and good friend, Licia Corbolante, points out cultural differences with regard to soccer in her Italian blog.

But the World Cup is just an event that lets us focus on South Africa. The country has had a rich multilingual history. With the end of apartheid came the recognition of eleven official languages: Afrikaans and English as well as the following nine indigenous languages: seSotho sa Lebowa, seSotho, seTswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. We, in Europe and America, are used to other multilingual countries, like Canada, Switzerland or Belgium, leading multilingual topics. But the general level of understanding of terminology issues in South Africa makes the US look like a developing nation.

There are many governmental bodies who do terminology work. The organization charged with promoting language issues is the Pan South African Language Board:

PanSALB“…PanSALB is a statutory body established to create conditions to develop and promote the equal use and enjoyment of all the official South African languages. It actively promotes an awareness of multilingualism as a national resource.” (http://www.pansalb.org.za/index.html).

The establishment of terminology is merely one of PanSALB’s many tasks and services. PanSALB members have also been actively involved in the creation of Microsoft terminology accessible on the Microsoft Language Portal in the following South African languages: Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, seSotho sa Lebowa, and seTswana.TAMA SA 2003

A look at the website for the TAMA (Terminology in Advanced Management Applications) conference in 2003 shows the multitude of terminology projects under way in South Africa: From the establishment of legal terminology in South African languages by organizations, such as the Centre for Legal Terminology in African Languages, to the work of the Terminology Subdirectorate of the National Language Service. And in time for the World Cup, the Department of Arts and Culture sponsored the publication of a Multilingual Soccer Terminology List.

Let me finish with a personal story: When I was in South Africa for TAMA in 2003, I had an exchange with a cab driver that really made me a terminologist. Ok, I had had the title “terminologist” since 1998, but I never told anyone. It was often too much trouble to explain what terminologists do. So, when the cab driver asked me what I had come to South Africa for, I told him that I was in Pretoria for a conference. “What subject area?” he kept prying. When I said terminology management, he responded, “oh, I have always been interested in semiotics.” Goooooooaal! Never after this conversation have I dumbed down what I really do.

*Borrowed from “Scatterlings of Africa” by Johnny Clegg

Posted in Events, Terminologist, Terminology portals | Tagged: , , | 9 Comments »

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