The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2020 - 24

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT TERMINOLOGY MANAGEMENT-
EVEN IF YOU NEVER TRANSLATE A SINGLE TERM continued

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO
IMPLEMENT PROACTIVE
TERMINOLOGY MANAGEMENT?

Figure 2: Translating with proactive terminology management can reduce the number of
transitions times to one.
Having a comprehensive, projectspecific, multilingual term base available
at the beginning of a translation
project made a dramatic difference in
my personal practice when I was still
working as a translation professional.
In all likelihood, being proactive when
it comes to terminology management
would also work for you. Why?
■	

You don't have to research
difficult words during translation,
which means;

■	

You can translate without
interruptions, which means;

■	

You can translate faster because there
are no transition times involving going
back and forth between your translation
environment and the terminology
management environment.

It's also worth noting that, at least in
my personal experience, transitioning
from terminology management to
translation only once not only improves
translation speed but also quality.
Eliminating interruptions for terminology
management also eliminates the risk
of losing your train of thought when
managing terminology during translation.
(See Figure 2 above for an illustration.)

For many quality-conscious translation
professionals, the answer to this question
is: surprisingly little! To implement a
simple proactive terminology management
practice, you only have to do two things.
First, you need to read the source text
in its entirety before translation (which
many of you already do). Second, while
reading the source text, extract, research,
and record the difficult words, phrases,
and their translations before you begin the
actual document translation process.
Even translation professionals who
are most comfortable working with
a word processor can start managing
terminology proactively-tomorrow, if
they so choose. As you can see in Figure
3 to the left, a standard word processor
can easily display a term base window in
addition to windows for the source and
target text, respectively.

HOW IS A TRANSLATION MEMORY
SYSTEM A SUPERIOR TRANSLATION
ENVIRONMENT, EVEN FOR NONREPETITIVE TEXT?
Many translation professionals I know
who work on non-technical/scientific/

Target
Text
Source
Text

Term
Base

Figure 3: Term base window when translating in a word processor
24

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