Quality product localizations are important contributors to a competitive edge in global markets. The benefits of accepted multi-lingual terminology are instrumental to quality localization.

1. Multi-Lingual Terminology in Global
Markets
Project Leads:
Arta Doci adoci@mines.edu
AlanK Melby, BYU
Date: 09-14-2005

2. INTRODUCTION
Global readiness has become an important objective for many IT companies
and a business necessity for today’s global market. Global readiness includes
internationalization and localization of products. The Localization Industry
Standards Association (LISA) defines localization as:
“taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally
appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language)
where it will be used and sold.”
Quality product localizations are important contributors to a competitive
edge in global markets. The benefits of accepted multi-lingual terminology
are instrumental to quality localization.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
One of the challenges that companies are facing with the localized software
products, which represent an emerging or new technology, is that there is a
lack of a widely accepted and standard multi-lingual terminology. This is
particularly true for applications, i.e. call centers, interactive voice response
software, and other voice and speech applications.
When a concept is introduced into a new market, there is typically no widely
accepted translation for the respective English term. So, the first attempt to
Consistent use of localize it faces the challenge of gaining acceptance with the customer or in
technical terminology general with the end user. Sometimes, a target language term does not make
is one of the most sense, e.g. ‘trunk group’, which in Russian was translated as ‘bunch of lines’.
important factors in In such cases, an acceptable term must be found and used consistently within
localization quality. products and documentation.
In order to achieve agreed upon terminology, it is necessary to set up a multi-
lingual terminology system and apply it throughout the global information
localization process.
SOLUTION and PLANS
The goal is to build and apply an online multi-lingual terminology system .
In general, terminology refers to a technical vocabulary, i.e. a collection of
terms with certain coherence within a specific domain, e.g.
telecommunications.

3. The multi-lingual terminology system will be built in the following five steps:
Step one Collection of the English terminology. Input English terminology
(i.e. term, its definition, and a context in which it can be used. ) in
the online multi-terminology database.
Step two Collection of the terminology options in each target language.
Step three Multi-lingual terminology translation selection: Data analysis
(Clean-up of the data; Criteria on how to select the appropriate
term)
Step four Making the multi-lingual terminology available
Step five Ongoing Updates
The establishment of such multi-lingual terminology has many benefits.
BENEFITS
1. The primary benefit will be the improved quality of localized products,
thus helping to:
Improve customer satisfaction.
Provide consistent terminology across the product line.
2. Another important benefit results from adopting the online approach:
Online vs. Traditional Methods
The advantages of an online version over traditional media (i.e. books,
journals, etc.) are as follows:
Data collection will be faster;
The main benefit of the
multi-lingual terminol- Acceptance of terminology within international markets will be faster
ogy is improved quality
as well since results can be shared earlier;
of localized products.
Traditional methods take into account only the opinion of a few people,
while the online database will be open to many people throughout the
global community, thus providing a larger pool to select data from;
Ongoing updates would happen immediately and efficiently.