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Archives for May 2010

Dog food anyone?

May 27, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

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.

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What is a term?

May 20, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

A few years ago, my director at the time asked this seemingly innocent question. It isn’t a conundrum only to sponsors of terminology projects: Content publishers, localizers and other users of a terminology database are wondering as well. And while the more senior terminologists, who have heard this question before, may roll their eyes, it isn’t one that will go away. Since there is no one solution to this puzzle, it deserves some analysis.

The correct, yet to the director meaningless answer could have been “a verbal designation […] of a general concept […] in a specific subject field” (ISO 1087-1). Terminologists may be happy with a clear, concise definition – that’s what we are all about. But a director? Very likely he was looking for something else.

The form that question may take for a content publisher is: What term needs to be added to the terminology database to support the localization team? Even terminologists ask each other: Does this “thing” go in or not? And while localizers at the end of the workflow may be less selective–after all, they need answers, and they need them fast -, they, too, may wonder: Can I add this terminology question to the database or not? So, what the director and everyone else is interested in is the scope of a corporate terminology database; the range of stuff that is entitled to an entry; the definition of the corporate terminology.

ISO 704, for example, says “a terminology shall include lexical units that are adequately defined in general language dictionaries only when these lexical units are used to designate concepts that form part of the concept system.” Definition by exclusion–that is not a bad start.

Let’s assume that a software company doesn’t publish poetry or fiction. Rather just about anything that comes up in the company material, e.g. user interface, documentation, websites, etc., is technical language, and many of the lexical units used are technical terms. Almost all of the technical terms that could be excluded according to the above recommendation from ISO 704 are needed to clarify relationships to other lexical units. Or to standardize target-language equivalents. Or to clarify meaning. So, while defining the scope by excluding things, we need to look further.

In terminology work, three types of designations are distinguished: symbols, appellations and terms (ISO 1087-1). A well-known symbol, at least back when localization was first taught, was the mailbox. (It was used often in localization classes, because it was highly culture-specific and had little meaning for many people outside the United States; in many applications, it has been replaced by the icon of an envelope since). A good example for an appellation is the name of an organization (e.g. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)) or country (e.g. Serbia). Appellations designate or stand for individual concepts, things that exist just once in the world. Terms, on the other hand, represent general concepts, e.g. beer bottle or virtualization).

If all corporate language is technical language and many of the designators would qualify for an entry in a terminology database, which terms, symbols or appellations should not be included? What tends to be excluded are:

  • Symbols (e.g. icons)
  • Longer text (e.g. error messages)
  • Fictitious names (e.g. company names used as examples in demo data)
  • Examples (e.g. example data used to explain the functionality in an ERP application)

Often, there are other databases that house, categorize and standardize symbols and even fictitious names. Otherwise, they could be included in a terminology database as well. Longer text units and examples simply don’t have a good return on investment: Error messages, boilerplate texts, etc. don’t need to be defined and are better stored in translation memories; examples may be very culture-specific and might need to be adjusted or are not worthwhile defining and standardizing in a database.

So, include anything with a return on investment and exclude what is stored elsewhere or doesn’t pay off. Pragmatic guidelines like these will at least keep a team of terminologists aligned. Do we need a more concrete rule in addition? Not in my opinion. There are other questions that need to be asked, but they are for another time.

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On Good Terms – blog post by Barbara I. Karsch

May 2, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

After 12 years as corporate terminologist, I just left a full-time position at Microsoft. Over the years, I have encountered and solved many different terminological puzzles. In this blog, I’d like to share puzzles related to the individual pieces–the words and terms–the good, the bad and the ugly; to the tool they reside in, also known as a terminology management system; to the processes with which we move those puzzle pieces; and last but not least to the people who play the puzzle, their skills and challenges.

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