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Terminologist position at IBM Canada

October 1, 2012 by Barbara Inge Karsch

There are not a lot of trained terminologists around the world and not necessarily a lot of positions either. I get questions on how to find a job from students and former students often enough. From now on, I will try to provide ways to make that connection and also post job openings. Here is one from IBM.

Job Title: Terminologist

Main Responsibilities include:
The terminology group helps product developers, writers, and translators use the correct terminology in IBM products and materials. The group currently has an open position for a junior terminologist. Regular tasks include creating and updating terminological entries in a multilingual terminology database, and identifying terms from an automatically extracted corpus that are relevant to translators. The position includes the following additional responsibilities:

  • Researching and defining new terms
  • Using a terminology management system to create, update, or streamline definitions, and add other metadata such as parts of speech, grammatical information, and context sentences
  • Using sound terminological principles, establish relationships between synonyms and other related concepts
  • Importing new terminology into the database and exporting existing terminology into various forms of output including glossaries and bilingual dictionaries
  • Working with writers and translators worldwide to establish a controlled vocabulary

Qualifications:

  • Excellent command of English with excellent writing and communication skills
  • Education program: Linguistics, Terminology, Semiotics, or Translation degree

For more information see the job posting.

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UI is communication

August 19, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

And communication contains technical terminology. Here is a simple way of showing this.

A UX designer who gets not only the user focus, but who also knows the critical role of language is my former colleague, Windows UX designer and now principal of UX Design Edge, Everett McKay. I borrowed the title of this posting from his presentation which later became a book: UI is Communication.

Obviously not everything on the user interface is language or terminology-related. And with the increased use of touch, voice or motion interaction, we might see an even clearer focus of certain types of software on these other ways of communication.

But a simple screen shot without words can demonstrate that certain types of user interfaces rely heavily, if not exclusively, on language as the means of communication between the developer of the product and the user. If the developer does not communicate the intent of the form, screen, etc. well, the user will struggle.

Here is a form without words. Get it? No? No problem: I designed it in Visual Studio myself, and I am a level 0 designer on Everett’s scale. So, there is nothing to get other than terminology on the form matters.

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Avoiding doublettes or a report from the ISO meetings in Korea

June 23, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

One of the main reasons we have doublettes in our databases is that we often don’t get around to doing proper terminological analysis. I was just witness to and assistant in a prime example of a team doing this analysis at the meetings of ISO TC37.

ISO TC 37 is the technical committee for “Terminology and other language and content resources.” It is the standards body responsible for standards such as ISO 12620 (now retired, as discussed in an earlier posting), 704 (as discussed here) or soon 26162 (already quoted here). This year, the four subcommittees (SCs) and their respective working groups (WGs) met in Seoul, South Korea, from June 12 through 17.

One of these working groups had considerable trouble coming to an agreement on various aspects of a standard. Most of us know how hard it is to get subject matter experts (or language people!) to agree on something. Imagine a multi-cultural group of experts who are tasked with producing an international standard and who have native languages other than English, the language of discussion! The convener, my colleague and a seasoned terminologist, Nelida Chan, recognized that the predicament could be alleviated by some terminology work, more precisely by thorough terminological analysis.

First, she gave a short overview of the basics of terminology work, as outlined in ISO 704 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Then the group agreed on the subject field and listed it on a white board. Any of the concepts up for discussion had to be in reference to this subject field; if the discussion drifted off into general language, the reminder to focus on the subject field was right on the board.

The group knew that they had to define and name three different concepts that they had been struggling with, although lots of research had been done; so we put three boxes on the board as well. We then discussed, agreed on and added the superordinate to each box, which was the same in each case. We also discussed what distinguished each box from the other two. Furthermore, we found examples of the concepts and added what turned out to be subordinates right into the appropriate box. Not until then did we give the concepts names. And now, naming was easy.

Step 1 SUBJECT FIELD
Step 2 Superordinate Superordinate Superordinate
Step 3 Distinguishing characteristic 1
Distinguishing characteristic 2
Distinguishing characteristic 1
Distinguishing characteristic 2
Distinguishing characteristic 1
Distinguishing characteristic 2
(Step 4) Subordinate
Subordinate
Step 5 Designator Designator Designator

After this exercise, we had a definition, composed of the superordinate and its distinguishing characteristics as well as terms for the concepts. Not only did the group agree on the terms and their meanings, the data can now also be stored in the ISO terminology database. Without doublettes.

Granted, as terminologists we don’t often have the luxury of having 15 experts in one room for a discussion. But sometimes we do: I remember discussing terms and appellations for new gaming concepts in Windows Vista with marketing folks in a conference room at the Microsoft subsidiary in Munich. Even if we don’t have all experts in shouting distance, we can proceed in a similar fashion and collect the information from virtual teams and other resources in our daily work. It may take a little bit to become fluent in the process, but terminological analysis helps us avoid doublettes and pays off in the long run.

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