BIK Terminology

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

Terminological Scatterlings*

by

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.

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 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.

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

SHARE THIS:

Abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng

by

Does this look like a cat ran across a keyboard to you? This is how speakers of the indigenous Australian language Bininj Gun-wok say “I cooked the wrong meat for them again,” according to an article from The New Scientist.  While these linguistic units do not represent a concept that would come up in a localization environment and Bininj Gun-wok is not one of the languages into which products are localized frequently, if at all, this example shows perfectly well that languages have different ways to represent concepts. And we better not force the system of one language onto another.

The good thing is we don’t have to. Translators work through the concept. That means, they understand what a term, word or expression (e.g. “I cooked the wrong meat for them again”) means in the source language and then find the target-language equivalent (e.g. abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng). Believe me–it takes a lot of analysis by a genius translator to turn a phrase into a perfect one-word equivalent!

While there are patterns on how languages represent concepts (e.g. noun-noun, adjective noun), there is no rule that says what is an adjective-noun combination in one language must be an adjective-noun combination in another.

Localizers often try to create target terms that stick close to the source language pattern, so that they can repeat it when more new terms are created in the source language. That is not a bad idea, as long as they don’t take a shortcut and fail to examine what the concept behind the term is.

A few years ago, the Japanese team working on the localization of a Windows product suggested that ‘compliance report’ be renamed in English. The content publishing team provided background information, but the localizers insisted that it be changed in the English material, because “it was hard to translate into Japanese.” The writers wanted to be good citizens and changed it to ‘status report,’ as the Japanese native speakers had suggested. Not only do ‘compliance’ and ‘status’ not represent the same idea, ‘compliance report’ came up again in another related product. When that product team was asked to change it to ‘status report’, they refused. After all it was correct and clear English.

While it is good practice to provide feedback on neoterms (newly created technical terms) that are culture-laden (e.g. breadcrumb bar) or product names that are to remain in the source language (e.g. Windows Vista), here are the consequences of the above scenario:

If writers, editors, PMs, source terminologists and others working in the source language give in to such pressures from the loc team, they are creating a synonym for a term that worked perfectly well and represented a concept uniquely. Another team that needs to communicate about the same concept will not even thing about looking at a good term, much less changing it. And what if the new term that now works for Japanese doesn’t work for Turkish, French, Danish, Ukrainian…. Instead:

  • Avoid synonyms when you can.
  • Solicit feedback from other product teams before you change a term.
  • Be clear in the source language; customers and translators will understand what you meant.
  • Document terms and concepts in a centralized terminology database.

For localizers or target terminologists it is important to remember that the product will be released in the target language, whether a source term sounds good or not; in other words “…doesn’t work for my language” doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean that source terminology is always perfect. But product teams who get sidetracked on non-issues might not listen the next time there is a real globalization problem. Instead:

  • Focus on understanding concepts and finding clear target-language equivalents.
  • Spend time giving feedback on real errors or globalization issues.
  • And when researching terms, don’t take a shortcut–you would never come up with the perfect abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng!
SHARE THIS:

Dog food anyone?

by

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.

SHARE THIS:

BIK Terminology

From the Blog

Follow Me