Perfect synchronization. If you want to see it on full display in a breathtaking fashion, watch a local rowing team race. After hours and hours of practice, the team comes together, moving through all four stages of the stroke in perfect unison – oars hitting the water within fractions of a second, sending the boat down the channel with minimal waste of energy. The entire crew works as one to achieve the same goal.

Inspiring mental image, but what does it have to do with localization? Grab the oar, and let’s think it through. Coordinating terminology across translations, channels, and projects to maintain a consistent brand voice is every bit as challenging as getting eight individuals to coordinate strokes.

But when it’s done well, your brand meets the consumer in each of your markets precisely as it should with every touchpoint – and, further, the consistent use of terminology in each market allows you to maximize your SEO results. Like rowing, this coordinated effort yields ever greater results with less effort.

Terminology Management Workflows: The Secret to Communication Synchronization

Just like a crew boat has a coxswain in the stern to guide the boat’s direction, a terminology workflow formalizes the translation process to guarantee your translated content remains unique in tone, clear in communication, distinct from your competitors, and, most importantly, consistent.

The Chaos Before the Advent of Terminology Workflow

Despite everyone’s best intentions, translation is often relegated to a rush job and sent to a third party where the translator doesn’t have access to all the relevant information to guide voice and tone in translation. The result is inconsistent content that leaves customers confused or unsure of the intent of your message.

As a business that got our start in Language Quality Assurance (LQA), solving these inconsistencies became one of the biggest keys to helping customers succeed. And we, of course, found the fastest, most cost-effective way to solve these inconsistencies was to prevent them in the first place.

Directing the Oars to Drive Results: Terminology Management 101

Formalizing the translation process to capture commonly used terms, phrases, and industry jargon lets you catalog and store these translation fragments for future use.

The basic process is quite simple: perform an audit in the starting language and highlight consistently used technical terms that “stick out” as not general language.

Success Starts with Source Terminology Management

Once you have the terms identified from the audit above, you can create notes to briefly explain the term and the context of its use. A searchable terminology management database or “termbase” lets the translation team, who may not be technical experts in your field (but ought to be) quickly and consistently translate these unique terms faster and with less guesswork. This information will make any translator’s job easier – and ensure proper translations every time the term is used.

Branded Source Terminology: Keeping You Sounding Brand-Right All Around

How important is keeping your brand’s personality consistent? Consider this: If you are multilingual, your personality shines through in any language you are conversing. And even within the bounds of local culture, your personality is still you.

A brand does the same thing across markets and languages. Cataloging your personality in the source language allows you to consistently translate your brand’s spirit into the new language: Are you approachable? Light-hearted? Serious?

Language conveys all those things – and making sure it’s consistent is what capturing your Branded Source Terminology is all about.

Target Terminology Management Means Nothing is “Lost in Translation”

Specialized terms, industry jargon, and local SEO terms are all tracked and logged on the target terminology side of your system. This gives translators a consistent voice to work toward. It’s also far more efficient from a translation standpoint, as new translation vendors can be brought up to speed faster, and QA (Quality Assurance) systems have terms to check against.

Target Terminology Management as an SEO Strategy

Some companies put off international and multilingual SEO until localization is complete. This is a mistake – primarily since 90% of searches are conducted in a user’s native language.

By laying the groundwork for the SEO campaign during your website localization planning and entering these terms as part of your Target terminology, you can keep the budget in check and reduce ad hoc strategy re-works as you build the content for each market.

Custom or “Off-the-Shelf” Terminology Management? We Can Help You Decide

With over a decade of experience in the localization industry, we have plenty of experience with workflow implementation. We can help you decide if one of the industry-available terminology management systems is the right choice or if you need something custom.

In addition, we can work with your teams to define roles and responsibilities, help balance the needs of SEO and branded communications in every market and create processes that streamline change terminology management as the business and SEO needs arise. Just drop us a line, and we’ll get your team rowing like the champs they are!