What is terminology and does it have something to do with translation quality?

The answer is terminology is the study of terms and their use and yes it does.

We post 2 preliminary questions as referred to above to lead you to the importance of managing words and phrases ("Terms") before starting to translate to better understand and describe what the products, services and industry jargon are about. Thus, no inconsistent translation of specific words or phrases is found, no wrong translation is identified and the translation process can be smooth as expected.

With regard to the questions above, we would like to take you to general issue we often encounter. Let us take three different words that should be adapted to our target language [Indonesian]:

• performance [n]
• email [n]
• mobile phone [n]

Performance can be translated as kinerja or performa. Email can be translated as email, e-mail, surel, ratron or surat elektronik. Mobile phone can be translated as telepon seluler, telepon genggam, or ponsel. Imagine they appear many times in your text and they are translated differently but they still denote the same meaning. Say you found a word email in the first sentence of your text and found the other 2 anywhere in your text, but they read, in target, email in the first sentence and e-mail and surel anywhere in your text. We are sure this will disrupt you while reading - moreover, when this inconsistency occurs in a very sensitive document such as safety manual, user's manual, etc. We are not sure that the readers or users will be satistified with the products or services you offer. Thus, managing the terminology or terms is always needed in the translation process to generate quality translation to your standard. The process can occur before translating, while translating or after translating. If we can advise, the process should be taken before translating and the adaptation can be done later after the reviewer's feedback if any. This is at least based on our years of experience in terminology management.

We read this requirement and we always do this when translating. However, we sometimes found some companies requiring to translate their basic terms only to be used for the translation process later on. We can cater to this need. Just contact us for quote!

In dealing with this, we apply the following procedures:

• analysing the concepts and concept structures used in a field or domain of activity
• identifying the terms assigned to the concepts
• in the case of bilingual or multilingual terminology, establishing correspondences between terms in the various languages
• compiling the terminology, on paper or in database
• managing terminology databases
• creating new terms, as required

The terminology output we generate can be in the forms of Excel (.xls/.xlsx), Word (.doc/.docx), Power Point (.ppt/.pptx), Multiterm 9 (.sdltb), and any other forms you are familiar with and upon your request. Contact us for further information - it is free.