BIK Terminology

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

A new tool, a new app, a new what?

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Enterprise terminologists generally don’t have the easiest job—nobody understands what they are doing, most people don’t know that they exist, and some even refuse to cooperate. A widget may be just what they need.

A widget, really? While we can argue about the (code) name of the new SDL MultiTerm Widget, the concept behind it is a good one: It is a small application that anyone in a company can use to look up the meaning of a term. They just need to highlight the term, and the application displays a hit list, either from the company terminology database (MultiTerm, of course), a search engine or any website a user indicated in the app beforehand. A few different user scenarios for the Widget come to mind.

If I were still a corporate terminologist, I would put on a major campaign to introduce the Widget to any communication professional through a video, a brown bag meeting, or simply an e-mail. The main focus would be on how easy it is for lawyers, trainers, marketing and branding experts, etc. to use corporate terminology consistently. As non-terminology experts, these professionals cannot bother using a terminology-expert tool. They need information, and they need it fast.

Much to my chagrin, a link to LEO, a German-English online dictionary, was embedded in the German Microsoft intranet site. Now, there is nothing wrong with an online dictionary, but it was hard to turn people’s attention to the corporate database from this simple link. Since most terminology teams don’t have huge funds for tools development, the Widget could be that simple solution to steer employees away from unmanaged and to managed corporate terminology. If you put correct and standardized terms at their fingertips, they’ll use it.

Another scenario that came to mind when I saw the Widget the other day is visitors from subsidiaries. At J.D. Edwards, German consultants would come to the Denver headquarters fairly often to attend training session on the newer technologies. Their English was quite good, but they were not always familiar with every new term. They would ask us for glossaries to assist them during the training. If they had such a tool while they were working on a project in class, they could look up critical terms in the database.

Eventually, you would want the app to allow users to share terms that are not yet part of the database. We had an integrated terminology workflow with suggestion functionality at J.D. Edwards (see Perspectives on Localization) and later at Microsoft. Small terminologist teams at large companies need to stem a flood of unmanaged terms, and the closer they are to expert information, the better.

If the Widget doesn’t take off, it’s time for Michael W. to go join Kilgray and work on qTerm. But if SDL is smart, they price it for the masses and give enterprise terminology management a major boost.

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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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BIK Terminology

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