BIK Terminology

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

Archives for July 2010

Who cares about ISO 704?

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The next standard to talk about is ISO 704 “Terminology work—Principles and methods.” It is an interesting one for a variety of reasons. For one, I have more questions than answers.

At the TKE (Terminology and Knowledge Engineering) Conference in Dublin, my esteemed colleagues, Hanne Erdman Thomsen, Sue Ellen Wright, Gerhard Budin and Loïc Depecker will devote a workshop to ‘Accommodating User Needs for ISO 704: Towards a New Revision of the Core International Standard on Terminology Work’. I will have a short time slot to provide input myself and therefore have been re-reviewing ISO 704 over the last few days.

As I am putting my thoughts together, I was wondering: Who knows or uses ISO 704? I would like to invite you to do two things: Click on the little survey below in this posting. And, if you haven’t done so, please tell me about yourself by participating in the survey on the Survey tab. Both surveys are anonymous and might help me understand what this standard could do. If you know the standard and have something to share about it, please leave a comment below. I would be very grateful to get your input.

Because, quite frankly, I am puzzling over this standard. I have read it three times over the past year and every time after a few weeks go by, I have to think about what this standard is actually for. I believe it stems from the fact that it is a bit wordy at the moment. It contains a lot of good information, but the presentation is ineffective.

But now, what can it do for the reader? As its title says, it lays out the various principles underlying terminology management. For example, it tells us what objects, concepts, concept relations and concept systems are. It then goes into definitions and definition writing, before the subject of designations is discussed. Remember, this little graphic from What is a Term? As an aside, we talk about terms many times when we actually mean designations; in German, we even find the ugly Anglicism Term and its plural Terme.

So, ISO 704 really does do what the title says, it presents us with principles and methods. It just doesn’t seem to stick with me. Yet.

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ISO 12620—Why bother

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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?

Imagine 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. After 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.

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The Year of Standards

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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 […] for 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.

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