5 ways terminology helps your brand

When employed correctly, terminology allows your brand to remain consistent across all markets. Having a structured repository of terms or taglines your brand uses frequently and how they are to be translated into other languages ensures your message will never go wrong.  

Terminology management ensures key concepts and terms are consistent in both the source and target languages. This facilitates the linguist's content comprehension and mitigates mistranslations for the same concepts. 

A terminology strategy assists linguists in the development of consistent content, which minimizes the risk of inconsistencies in target locales, allowing uniform terminology throughout.

And of course, in a world where branding and corporate image are so critical, the implementation of terminology management best practices will aid enterprises to expand into international markets. 

Curious how terminology management can help your organization? Here are the top benefits.  

#1 High-quality content in any language

 The implementation of a robust terminology management program also allows enterprises to apply automated checks and provide effective quality controls during localization lifecycles. 

Linguistic quality assurance tools can help with the identification of terminology and assist in checking if approved terminology is adhered to in the target versions. 

Implementing a terminology program translates (no pun intended) into more consistency and higher quality products when your brand expands into international markets.  

#2 Brand recognition worldwide 

When dealing with a global brand image, accurate terminology enhances a company’s corporate image. We can all think of very specific tag lines that immediately are associated with a company. Without a doubt, terminology improves the end-user understanding of these products and mitigates the risks of brand erosion that arise from inconsistent translations. 

#3 Faster time-to-market for new products 

The lack of customer-specific terminology during a localization lifecycle can delay a translator up to 30 minutes to research a term, its technical definition, meaning, nuance and applicability in a translation segment. This results in a waste of costly time, which can be easily mitigated by doing the upfront work of implementing a terminology management program.   

Terminology management programs reduce the manual effort needed in researching unknown concepts, both upfront in the process and during validation cycles. It is an effective way to ensure compliance, reduce localization time and costs and safeguard higher quality. 

This also plays a critical part in processing time and time-to-market. By having approved terminology prior to the localization cycle, translators improve turnaround times, and efficiency and reduce the amount of work needed to research terminology. It also allows for automatic term recognition during segment translation. 

#4 Optimized marketing localization ROI  

Terminology is also a proven methodology to maximize cost reduction. Research shows how a terminology program could generate a return on investment of approximately 10% for companies scaling their marketing efforts internationally.  

And the same research shows how changing a term in a translation memory after a project has been finalized can cost 10 times as much as the expense of creating a term record in a termbase at the outset. 

The reuse of already approved terminology, coupled with a reduced effort in localizing (and creating) new content, quality controls and automated error analysis leads to a reduced number of errors and significant savings. 

#5 A single source of truth for your corporate terms 

Centralization becomes a critical part of the equation when dealing with terminology management. Final terms, their approved translations and corresponding metadata need to be deployed in one common repository where it can be safely hosted and distributed to all stakeholders. 

This allows for clear guidelines for the use of corporate terms, and grants access to all stakeholders in the content lifecycle, also allowing the use of interchangeable terminology and industry standards. 

Terminology management doesn’t have to be a difficult process when you’re working with the right language service provider. In fact, it can save your organization precious time, money, and resources.