Terminology QA
One of the issues with TMs that I found interesting are their different philosophies when it comes to terminology quality assurance approaches. While they all work in a similar way in supporting the translation workflow, the QA is a different matter. While translating, all tools basically help you to maintain a terminology list in (normally) two languages. The tools search the source text for a term that is in the list and then in one way or the other flag that sentence. When you come up to the sentence while you translate, the tool would usually make you aware of the source term and that there is one or more translations for that term available. It then helps you to insert the right term and everybody lives happily ever after.
Additionally a good terminology tool allows you also to add terminology on the fly. You can usually highlight a term, add it to the terminology list and then enter the translation and a bit of information to the terminology list (which then deserves capitalisation and the title “Terminology Database”).
Now all this is pretty straight forward, isn’t it? But the cool thing is the QA - the step at the end, where you are made aware of inconsistencies. And here is where the tools are different. Some, for example, check that when there is a term in the source text, that is in the termbase, then there should be the target language term in the target cell. If not, then the tool will ask you about each of those translation units if the correct translation was selected. Usually this step works automatically - so you just have to ask your TM “show me the inconsistent translations (always compared with the terminology list) and let me decide if I like them”.
Interestingly, however, only few tools work the other way around: they flag terms in the [b:a617e2bc1d]target text[/b:a617e2bc1d] that are on the terminology list ask you to check in case the source text doesn’t feature the corresponding word form the terminology list in the source language. Seems to be so easy that you wonder why they don’t do it…
Cool are also a range of external tools to which you can feed translated bilingual files and a terminology list. The tool will then do the work and will flag anything that looks suspicious.
Well, what ever you do it’ll be worth it. I sometimes think that terminology tools are highly under-valued considering the improvements they can bring to our our clients.