Cooking a meal is much easier when all your ingredients are prepared and laid out in front of you, ready to combine into a delicious dish. And it’s the same with localization—a little preparation makes the process a lot smoother. That’s where terminology management comes in.
What is terminology management?
Terminology management involves identifying key words and phrases for your global content, and ensuring they’re always used and translated consistently.
Without this, you risk confusing and frustrating your international clients—leading to queries, complaints, and loss of trust in your brand. Ambiguous or inconsistent terminology can also cause misunderstandings internally, wasting time and resources.
When you partner with Rubric, terminology management is baked into your entire localization workflow—including human and machine translations—improving the experience for you and your customers.
Human or machine?
At Rubric, we expertly balance human and machine translation to achieve the best outcomes for you, depending on your content, timescales, and budget. While the processes are different, good terminology management is essential for both.
Machine translation (MT) engines rely on rules and patterns, so work best when there’s a single, defined translation. Humans, on the other hand, are more comfortable with ambiguity, able to select from multiple translation options depending on the context.
Take the UI string “State”, for example: does this mean geographic, status, or is it even a verb? A well-managed glossary can help navigate ambiguities like this, encouraging authors to write simply and promoting smooth translation, whether human or machine.
For best results regardless of the process, Rubric operates a dual-glossary strategy, where we can mark glossary items as “human only” or “machine only”. Our robust quality checks and human oversight provide additional peace of mind.
Why terminology management matters
Terminology management improves clarity, accuracy, and consistency, bringing a range of benefits for your business:
Benefit #1: Improved customer experience—in all markets
For a seamless experience, the same terms should be used across all touchpoints. For example, your online help needs to use the same terms as your UI, and that alignment should extend through technical documentation to marketing and customer support.
Benefit #2: Faster time to market
A reliable glossary streamlines content creation and sets your translators up for success, meaning fewer translation errors and queries. So, you can get quality content to your global audience faster.
Benefit #3: Cost savings and efficiency
Terminology management optimizes your source content for translation, making the process faster and reducing wasted effort. And as your glossary grows, you won’t pay again for existing translations. You’ll also make savings on customer support if your UI, online help, and FAQs are consistent and easy to follow.
Benefit #4: Stronger brand voice
Using consistent language and style builds brand recognition across markets, while the positive customer experience boosts loyalty.
Rubric’s steps to success
We embed terminology management throughout your localization workflow for seamless efficiency. Here’s how:
- Glossary building: We start by compiling a glossary of terms that need to be handled consistently. Examples include technical, industry, or brand terms, as well as ambiguous words or phrases with various meanings or nuances. Definitions and usage examples are added to support translators.
- “Do Not Translate” list: Some brand names or copyrighted terms need to stay the same in all markets. Agreeing which terms not to translate avoids wasted translation effort and protects your brand.
- Glossary translation and approval: Glossary terms are translated by our linguists and approved (by you, your trusted reviewer, or another expert linguist, as appropriate). Where more than one translation is possible, translators can add contextual notes to eliminate ambiguity.
- Consistent translation: Linguists integrate the final glossary into their translation tools, which automatically identify terms with approved translations and can check the glossary has been followed. We also use glossaries to customize our machine translation tools to your needs.
- Quality assurance: Going a step further, we can configure our automated RubricCatcher tool to flag potential errors or inconsistencies across languages, for both human and machine translation.
- Maintenance: We work with you to build a transparent workflow for maintaining the glossary. How will terms be added, updated, or removed as your products and brand evolve? How often will it be reviewed, and who is responsible?
- Continuous improvement: As we become familiar with your standards, particularly around brand names, we take care to report back any errors or inconsistencies we spot in the source. This ongoing dialogue helps prevent translation errors and keeps our translations on brand.
Glossary management is all about teamwork: the better we understand your needs, the more accurately we can translate your content. For example, if you’re rebranding or adding new products, let us know so we can get new translations in place. It’s also important to connect internal stakeholders, so everyone agrees on the terms being used.
Solving your business problems with terminology management
At Rubric, we’ve seen first-hand how good terminology management helps global businesses operate more efficiently. For example:
- Internal silos are causing confusion: When multiple departments work on product development, they may use different terms, style, or formatting. Referring to a centralized, up-to-date glossary ensures everyone is “speaking the same language” and delivers more consistent source text. This improves the user experience and lets you leverage existing translations, saving time and money.
- You need to reduce costs and time to market: Similar but inconsistent source text can lead to duplicated effort. Having a “single source of truth” is more efficient for translation. Agreeing translations upfront, and automating quality checks, also saves queries and rework further down the line.
- You’re expanding into new markets: An established glossary in one language makes it easier to add others—you already know the terms to translate consistently (or not at all). And it can really speed things up for language variants, such as Spanish for Spain and Mexico.
- Cultures are uniting: When you’re working through a merger or acquisition, agreeing terminology reduces duplication and supports a consistent brand voice.
Why choose Rubric?
We’re passionate about making your processes more efficient and improving the quality of your translations—whether they’re done by humans, AI, or a best-of-both model. Speak to us about how we can optimize your terminology management to take the stress out of localization.