BIK Terminology

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

TermNet Survey Results

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Thank you for participating in the TermNet Terminology Survey! The results are in. If you participated and signed up to get a summary of the results, you should have received them this week. If you signed up, but didn’t receive them, feel free to send me an e-mail. We also have a winner of the prize drawing. Petr from Prague will receive free tuition at the Terminology Summer School in Cologne, July 11 – 15. More information about this event is forthcoming on the TermNet website.

To get an idea about the event, click on the image. And for more information on the survey results, check back here.

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Don’t use jargon!!

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Or ‘I need to learn your jargon, so that we can understand each other’. What now? Can we use jargon or not? As so often: it depends.

I recently overheard my husband, Greg, who works with Microsoft partners interested in the MS cloud computing product, say to a partner: “I need to learn your jargon.” I nearly interrupted him to suggest that the partner send him an excerpt of the company’s terminology database. If they had one.

What do editors mean when they say “don’t use jargon”? There are two distinct concepts that are covered by the English term jargon:

  1. The specialized technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject.
  2. A characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves).

Whether to use it or not is a matter of definition. The first meaning is really a synonym to the collection of terms or the technical terminology. Can you use that jargon? Well, what else would you use? The Microsoft partner who is in the medical software business probably flung acronyms like HIPPA and HIMSS around, and there is no way to avoid concepts like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, short HIPAA, if you are to figure out whether healthcare information can be stored in the cloud and how. Greg needs to bite the bullet. If the partner could quickly produce a list of the 20 most important terms and definitions for others to review, communication would happen faster and with fewer misunderstandings.

The second meaning is the one to stay away from, not only because the example suggests that thieves use jargon. The main problem is that it is a language that only a particular group can understand and that would exclude others. It is generally not the intent in technical communication to exclude someone from using a product or service. Since your customer base might be diverse, it is a good idea to have a clear persona in mind before developing a new product.

An example where a language mediator might go back and forth between jargon (meaning 1) and jargon (meaning 2) is medical interpretation. If a physician asks a patient about a “cardiac arrest” he chooses a technical medical term. The interpreter might chose to convey that with “heart attack” to the elderly farm worker from Latin America and therefore transfers what might have been meaningless jargon to the patient into the terminology with the right register.

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Corporate Language

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In the recent TermNet survey, 60% of participants stated that they agreed with the statement “corporate language helps to set a company off from its competitors”. What is corporate language? Think tall, grande, and venti.

60% is not a lot. I expected more. It could be that people didn’t know for sure what “corporate language” is. And while researching, I couldn’t find an English definition. The German equivalent comes up a lot more often. From responses to the blog on my Facebook site, it also seems that Firmensprache triggers fewer emotional responses than corporate language does. But let me try to describe it.

On the one hand side, it is the plethora of acronyms and terms, the jargon that employees of a company use in their daily work. An example of corporate language that is used “inside” of a company is code names. For Windows 7, the revised taskbar was internally called superbar.

On the other hand, it is the terms, words, phrases, names, slogans, etc., in short, the language that is used to communicate with “the outside world” of clients and partners. That also includes the corporate style. Ideally, what is used towards the outside is also used on the inside. Why? Because consistency is one of the critical aspects of a functioning corporate language. We can still find superbar on the internet today. It may not have done damage, but it wasn’t the most straightforward and clear communication about a revised feature for Windows 7.

In The Importance of Consistent Brand Messaging branding expert, Rick Thompson, emphasizes the importance of consistency: “You must speak to the market with one unified voice. The brand character must be defined and socialized to everyone in the company so they can design, develop, support, sell and market the product in a manner consistent with the essence of the brand.

How do you make sure that employees speak with one voice? You guessed it: Terminology management. Designators, i.e. terms, appellations and symbols, are the linguistic and symbolic representation of a brand. Well-motivated and managed designators enable a company to be consistent in the messaging. By applying terminology management methods, those designators are documented correctly and available to everyone in the company at any time.

Not all corporate terms are well-motivated or work equally well, of course: How many of you have gone to a competing brand of Starbucks and ordered a venti? I wouldn’t be caught dead.

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