The number one global branding goal? Brand consistency, of course – Over 80% percent of global brands agree consistency is key to customer trust. What are ways to ensure brand consistency that knows no borders? Through brand terminology.
Terminology management is much more than creating a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual term base – it’s a methodology that helps us identify, localize, approve and centralize corporate terminology across an enterprise.
Specific terminology in a brand term base - think of it as a glossary - work together to save time and money, ensure consistency and industry compliance and consolidate multilingual content. It serves as your organization’s single source of truth!
So what’s the path to worldwide consistency, compliance and recognition?
Step 1: Analyzing your terms
First, what terms are crucial to your enterprise or industry? It could be product names, industry terms, or untranslatable words. Through collaboration, we can assist you in performing an analysis on your existing terminology assets. In other words, we analyze term bases structurally and linguistically.
During the structural analysis, we assess whether metadata across multiple assets is consistent and how this can be further harmonized to achieve global brand consistency. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis identifies cases where terminology was used inconsistently across term bases.
After this analysis has been completed, our language experts provide guidelines for best practices.
Step 2: Creating your terms
A lack of term bases isn’t a barrier to creating your assets. In the absence of existing assets, we start by establishing a terminology program with Terminology Creation. This is also beneficial for technical writers, UI developers, marketing staff or even procurement personnel within your organization. And of course, it is vitally important for your multilingual content, linguists, translators and reviewers.
Terminology is not only for bilingual or multilingual content. Terminology is also critical and becomes the solid basis for brand consistency in one, two or 100 languages – there is no minimum. Think of it as your company’s guide to a consistent message across all marketing channels.
Step 3: Gathering target terms for your term base
Once the key terms are validated by your enterprise and Acolad, if applicable, we can use our technology to suggest target proposals to the key terms – the main advantage being the facilitation of existing potential translations for key terms, as well as a faster turnaround time during the term localization process. This will save you time and resources down the road. We call this step Bilingual Term Extraction.
All term extractions processes go through a human, manual validation to determine the final term list. This process is a collaboration. In fact, customer input and validation of the final term base is highly encouraged. This will ensure that both your organization and Acolad work on a predefined set of validated terms, thereby reducing guesswork and rework.
This will ensure your important enterprise or industry terms are unified creating brand consistency.
Step 4: Finding and distributing your terms
For terminology to be effective, it needs to become a corporate asset, clearly and uniformly structured, consistent, available, and supported by technology.
So, once these are created, where do they go and how can they be accessed? You can find these lexical assets through collaboration platforms and web-based applications that empower everyone with easy access to the right terminology. They house key concepts, definitions, abbreviations, corresponding approved translations, pictures, and other attributes – all in one place. This, synchronized with translation workflows, ensures an effortless terminology search experience for every user.
Step 5: Keep your term base clean and healthy
It’s important to know terminology term bases are living entities and as such, terms evolve, change and new translations emerge. Consequently, term bases need maintenance - perhaps a new, more accurate translation for an existing term has arisen in the target locale, or new terms from a new line of products must be added to an existing term base.
Final thoughts: Let’s discuss specifics
We support you in all your enterprise efforts; after all, we are your end-to-end content services provider. We will gladly discuss with you the specific requirements of tools, platforms, frequency of maintenance cycles and stakeholders in charge on both sides.
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