At Localization World Dublin 2014, I spoke on “Latest trends in terminology”.
The presentation was entitled: “If Content is King, Terminology is Queen” and took place on the 4 th of June at The Convention Centre, Dublin.
Speakers at the conference included representatives from Adobe Systems, eBay, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and other notable companies. The conference is held by MultiLingual
Computing, Inc. and The Localization Institute.
Attendees could choose from nine tracks during the main conference: Global Business,
Web/Mobile, Content Strategy, Translation Automation (TAUS), Localization Core
Competencies, Advanced Localization Management, Localization Service Provider
(LSP), Unconference and The Inside Track.
The preconference day, on the 4th of June, included round tables for consultants and
topics that include sales and marketing, life science business and game localization.
There was also a professional development initiative, an introduction to localization, a
quality evaluation summit and a track on interoperability standards.
I gave my presentation at TAUS-TaaS Workshop :Terminology in Localization.
TAUS-TaaS workshop was a free half-day meeting aimed to bring together terminology
practitioners, business stakeholders and researches to discuss the latest advances and
challenges in the terminology field.
TaaS workshop was a highly interactive event were researchers, software and service
companies, as well as users actively shared their experiences with the practical
application of terminology in the technical documentation life cycle and other areas of
the content value chain, including translation and localization workflows. Crisp use cases
from companies and practitioners on terminology in localization and current trends were
provided.
There was an official presentation of the new terminology platform:
Terminology as a Service.
In my presentation, I tackled the terminology trends and shared some examples
from my professional experience.
The main points of the presentations were:
- Communicating about terminology by using social networks;
- Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms.
- Websites are made of content and terminology is the critical part of the user experience.
- Managing and sharing terminological data: cloud based, collaborative and social platforms.
- The subject field of terminology is overwhelming, so some websites provide
- terminological resources in few clicks.
In details:
- Communicating about terminology by using social networks:
- Social media is an appropriate consultation and response mechanism for terminological queries.
- Social media offers easy access to expert opinions by researching and asking questions to followers, and establishing their expertise by answering questions.
- Who is following terminology related conferences can live-tweet updates.
- Companies such as translation agencies usually do not merely promote their business and services, but provide helpful tips and links.
- Social networks are a source in terminological research. By providing latest news in terminology, or issues facing translators/terminologists and how they are dealing with them.
- In a collaborative effort, everyone contributes what they have, what they know, what they have read or seen, to the mix.
Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms.
The explosion of social media has accelerated the creation of new words as different
cultures and languages interact. The curiosity for neologisms is becoming stronger and
stronger. Twitter is the most suitable social media to track language changes. Its data is
public and immediately available. More and more researchers are beginning to work on
projects consisting in analysing tweets to catch the next most popular word. A huge data
consisting of around 340 million tweets sent every day, according to Twitter. Twitter
offers records of language mutating in real time and space. Many tweets provide location
data and the time they were sent allowing thus to map out the way in which new words
become popular and spread. Because tweets tend to be rather informal, there are a lot
of types of creative usages of words. Tweets appear similar to spontaneous speech,
making them particularly valuable to the study of the spread of new words and
expressions. The users of online social media produce a tremendous amount of text
each day, much of which is readily available for lexicographical analysis. Easy access to
such very large corpora is quite new, and has opened new possibilities for
lexicographical inquiry. In particular, corpus patterns that are very rare in conventional-
size corpora turn to have many occurrences in the very large corpora of social media.
Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in
fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language
data to analyze.
If content is King, Terminology is Queen
Websites are made of content. User interacts with content. When users encounter
problems with content, then those problems often culminate in terminological issues.
Content is part of the user experience mix and terminology is the critical part of the user
experience.
Terminology can be seen as a resource that can improve the performance and
effectiveness of a broad range of language-related applications of websites, beyond
translation, including:
- Web lookup;
- Publication of website glossaries (where users can find the meaning of corporate terminology at a glance. Those glossaries not only cover an explicative function, but also improve the SEO of the websites, in being descriptive keywords for search engines to index);
- Improvement of productivity, searchability, findibility of content (keywords, query expansion, query correction, faceted search);
- Text analysis, text mining;
- Term extraction and other forms of knowledge discovery;
- Online Terminology Extraction tools can be successfully used to raise a website visibility and SEO by using extracted terms as keywords, tags and meta-tags and indexing;
- Developing user-friendly navigation.
Managing and sharing terminology: cloud based, collaborative and social
platforms
Sharing terminology can only bring benefits. It helps improving consistency, uniformity
and reliability of data. The sharing of existing terminological data helps lexicographers,
translators, and terminologists to use right terms even without being experts and
prevents them from spending too much time looking for resources, extracting terms and
checking their reliability.
One-stop shop websites for terminology resources
The subject field of terminology is overwhelming, there is so much information scattered
here and there on the Internet that is easy to get lost with so much information. In order
not to spend hours surfing the internet, universities or simply passionates, are taking the
initiative to develop websites and blogs applying, in the words of Google, the “I’m feeling
lucky” approach: to find the information that you are looking for just by a few clicks.
