BIK Terminology

Solving the terminology puzzle, one posting at a time

You say Aaaazure, I say Azuuuure…

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Two years after the then new cloud-computing technology by Microsoft was named Windows Azure, Microsoft employees and partners are still wondering how to pronounce the name. Is that a good thing for product branding? Probably not.

Naming is a big part of terminology management. In her presentation for the last DTT symposium, Beate Früh, language service manager at Geberit International AG, a European producer of sanitary technology, described very well how she and her team support engineers in finding the right names, terms or labels for new products or parts (for examples see the adjacent image or the slide deck in German). One of the keys: The team comes in early in the process to help engineers find the best possible terms.

What are best possible terms or appellations? Obviously, each language has its own rules on term formation, as discussed in What I like about ISO 704. But here are the main criteria as well as a checklist that good terminology should meet, again courtesy of ISO 704:

  • Transparency: Can the reader understand what the concept is about by looking at the term?
  • Consistency: Is the new term or appellation consistent with the naming in the subject field? Or does it introduce new aspects at least very deliberately or only when necessary?
  • Appropriateness: Are the connotations evoked by the designation intentional? And do they follow “established patterns of meaning within the language community?”
  • Linguistic economy: Is the term or appellation as short as possible, so as to avoid arbitrary abbreviations by users?
  • Derivability and compoundability: Is it easy to form other terms, e.g. compounds, with the new term?
  • Linguistic correctness: Does the new designation conform to morphological, morphosyntactic, and phonological norms of the language?
  • Preference for native language: Is the new term or appellation borrowed from another language? Or could it be replaced by a native-language designation?

Why would it take a terminologist to name things correctly? In the software industry, we used to say that programmers became programmers because they wanted to deal with 0s and 1s, not with words and terms. Similarly, product engineers are probably better with designing, developing, or testing devices rather than naming them. What’s more, they don’t necessarily think about what happens downstream, let alone set up entries in a terminology database.

Participants of the Life Science Roundtable at LocWorld yesterday in Seattle illustrated the necessity to deliberately choose terms and appellations early in the process, document them as well as their target-language equivalents and then use them consistently: After a device has gone through the regulatory process, even linguistic changes are extremely difficult, if not impossible to make. Tough luck then if a name doesn’t work very well in one or more of the other 25 target markets.

At Microsoft, most product names are run through a process called a globalization review. Marketing experts work with native-language terminologists on evaluating whether the above criteria are met. Some names obviously don’t get submitted. So, Aaaazure, Azzzzure…let’s call the whole thing off? No. But since I am now married to an “Azure evangelist”, I hope that the concept behind the appellation is really solid and makes up for the trouble we have with its pronunciation.

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TKE 2010—A Short Report

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TKE (International Conference of Terminology and Knowledge Engineering) was recently held in Dublin. The title this year was “Presenting Terminology and Knowledge Engineering Resources Online: Models and Challenges”. Here are my thoughts on three presentations on large database projects and one workshop.

One of the invited talks was given by Michal Boleslav Měchura and Brian Ó Raghallaigh who are the technical brains behind the Irish National Terminology Database that serves a stunning 600,000 users. Much like the Rikstermbanken of the Swedish Center for Terminology discussed in Quantity matters, this project makes a (corporate) terminologist’s mouth water for its funding. According to the project website, there are no fewer than 18 people on the project team. Michal shared how the team is using statistics and user feedback to improve the search capabilities, the user interface, and the data presentation.

BACUS (Base de Coneixement Universitari) is a terminology database created at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona by students as part of their course work. Students work with subject matter experts to create entries in at least three languages. Two of them must be languages taught at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting: Catalan, Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. The third may be a language not taught at the Universitat, such as Basque, Bulgarian, Danish, Slovak, Galician, Greek, Dutch, Norwegian, Latin, Pulaar and Swedish. In their paper, Aguilar-Amat, Mesa-Lao, and Pahisa-Solé describe in detail the high-quality approach that students are taking to arrive at their entries. For example, “all linguistic data included in the BACUS project are obtained from corpora of original texts in different languages on the same specialized subject.” The work on the database has been discontinued, but it is well worth a look.

Such a high-quality approach cannot be expected for entries from a federated term bank, such as EuroTermBank. This project, developed and managed by Tilde, is probably not new to you. Andrejs Vasiljevs presented the results of a survey of different groups of potential system users. In his paper, Andrejs discusses the need to open up term banks to user participation.

At J.D. Edwards user participation in the form of entry requests and comments was implemented in a format that allowed for prescriptive terminology management, as is necessary in the corporate environment. There is no reason, though, that federated term banks should not adopt Wikipedia-style knowledge sharing, approval mechanisms known from commercial sites, and the like. Once sharing, voting or commenting mechanisms are implemented, the key might be to get as many experts to use the database as possible, so that unreliable data be found and eliminated quickly. It would be interesting to discuss entry reliability with regard to these projects and the ones mentioned in Quantity matters.

The main workshop I would like to mention is, of course, the discussion of standard ISO 704. Thank you for participating through the survey and comments in Who cares about ISO 704, which I mentioned in my presentation. During the workshop, we agreed to suggest to the respective workgroup in ISO TC 37 to streamline the current content, review the example used, and add parts geared towards the different user groups. I very much enjoyed the work in this group and feel that it will lead to a better standard down the road.

The TKE organizing committee decided to expand membership of GTW (association of knowledge transfer), the organization behind TKE. A new subgroup of the Terminology group on LinkedIn is being formed specifically for that purpose. If you are interested, join the group called Association for Terminology and Knowledge Transfer; just allow a bit of time for approval.

To conclude my little TKE report: It was a particular pleasure to witness Gerhard Budin bestow the Eugen Wüster Prize upon Sue Ellen Wright and Klaus-Dirk Schmitz from Kent State University and Cologne University of Applied Science, respectively. It couldn’t have gone to two more well-deserving individuals.

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What I like about ISO 704

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The body of ISO 704 “Terminology work—Principles and methods” lists a bunch of important information for terminology work. But what stuck in my mind is actually the annexes, most of all Annex B.

In the current version 704:2009, Annex B is devoted to term-formation methods. In other words, it gives us the most important methods that we have available when creating new terms or appellations in English. It also notes what might be obvious to us, i.e. that these methods differ from language to language. For German, for example, we now have the new Terminologiearbeit – Best Practices which the German terminology association, DTT, published recently and which is more systematic about this topic than a standard might be.

Comprehensiveness need not be the goal of 704; awareness of these methods is more important. If half the content publishers, PMs, branding or marketing folks that I worked with in the IT world had read those five short pages, it would have done a world of good. Instead, I have heard colleagues mocking terminologists who, when coining new terms, pull out the Duden (the main German-German dictionary, similar to The Webster’s or Le Petit Robert) to apply one of these methods. She who laughs last, laughs best, though: New terms and appellations that are well-motivated—either rooted in existing language or deliberately different—last. Quickly invented garbage causes misunderstandings and costs money.

Annex B doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, but it lists the most important methods that can be used in term formation. Here are the three main methods and some examples:

  • The first one is the creation of completely new lexical entities (terms or appellations), also known as neoterms. One way of creating a neoterm is through compounding, where a new designation is formed of two or more elements, for example cloud computing.
  • Two methods that fall into the category of using existing forms are terminologization (see also How do I identify a term—terminologization) and transdisciplinary borrowing. An example of terminologization is cloud, where the everyday word cloud took on a very specific meaning in the context of computing, while the name of the computer virus Trojan horse was obviously borrowed from Greek mythology.
  • Translingual borrowing results in new terms and appellations that originate in another language. English climbing language, for example, is full of direct loans from a variety of other languages; just think of bergschrund, cairn or .

The above are just a few examples to give you an impression of what could be learned by reading Annex B. Incidentally, these are methods. They need to be applied correctly, not randomly. I can already hear it, “but I used transdisciplinary borrowing to come up with this [junk]”. No. Even if your orthopedist uses minimally-invasive arthroscopic surgery to fix your knee, you want him to be sure that you actually need surgery, right? If you need to coin English terms or appellations on a regular basis, Annex B of ISO 704 is worth your while. I also like Annex C. More about that some other time.

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