Keeping Termbases Healthy
As the localization maturity of companies and
organizations rises, so does the number of professionally implemented
terminology workflows and centralized termbases. Many of them, we are proud to
say, implement our workflow solution quickTerm based on SDL MultiTerm
technology (and thus also known as SDL MultiTerm Workflow).
No doubt:
Getting your terminology project off the ground was a major and very notable
accomplishment. However, once terminology is firmly established in the standard
process landscape of a company, an organization, or an LSP, the new levels of
sophistication lead to new challenges: Data integrity and quality tracking,
batch changing, or transforming of termbase content, dissemination of
terminology content into other tools, and, in general, new areas of application
for terminology. In order to tackle these challenges, we have developed Excelling
MultiTerm and Publishing MultiTerm. Actually, we have just released brand-new
versions of both problem solvers. And, by the way, Publishing MultiTerm and
Excelling SDL MultiTerm are part of our much larger suite of “tools for
language workers”: the expertTools.
Data Integrity and Quality
Just like
translation memories or any large content repositories, termbases also get
“dirty” after a while:
- Many export and import loops generate inconsistencies in the data, for instance, fields, picklist values, or languages that do not match the termbase definition
- Changes in picklists, database structures, and slight glitches in the migration processes lead to almost unnoticeable but problematic “inconsistent” data
- Annoying details like broken links surface more and more often
- Invalid duplicates that have been entered erroneously but are hard to get rid of make our terminology lives difficult
In our termbase
management solution Excelling MultiTerm,
we have implemented a great number of consistency checks that enable you to address
all these issues and even fix them automatically. So, for instance, if you have
German (DE) defined as your language in the termbase model, but some records
contain Austrian German (DE-AT), you can automatically map this to German (DE) and
add a regional usage label “Austrian” to it. Or you can automatically detect
and ideally even fix broken links between entries, terms, or to external
sources.
With Excelling MultiTerm, managing your data
is easy. For example, batch-deletion can be useful if
you want to undo an import or to remove a
complete language in one step. Another use case is to re-sort all terms in all
entries, moving the “preferred” terms to the top of each language.
Batch Editing Terminology
If you have
reached a certain maturity in your termbase content, you are bound to run into
issues that require batch processing of data. Maybe you need to move a field
from term level to language level or you want to batch-replace certain data,
run spellchecks etc. One elegant way to master these tasks is to use Excelling MultiTerm
that now even supports batch-exporting of Multimedia content. This is extremely
useful if, e.g., you want to shrink all images in a termbase at once.
The very
flexible and powerful filtering mechanisms
of Excelling MultiTerm enable you to filter content down to exactly what
you need. These filtering mechanisms let you combine several MultiTerm filters,
add term-level filtering, and even programmatic filtering with XPath or
externally developed code. These terms are then exported and inserted into MS
Excel directly via the API. Due to the non-linear structure of terminology
data, this is easier said than done, but we have devised a data structure in
Excel that supports the unpredictable and extremely flexible content you might
have in your termbase.
In MS Excel,
you can manipulate the termbase content in a structured and convenient way,
using all of Excel´s standard features like search/replace, moving entire columns,
spellchecking etc.
Getting the changed data back
After the
editing is done, you can synchronize the changed data back to MultiTerm. This again
sounds easier than it actually is because Excelling MultiTerm has to recognize
the difference between new terms and changed terms during the import. Due to our
sophisticated stamping mechanism, Excelling MultiTerm is able to detect changes
and apply them to the termbase. The standard MultiTerm import mechanism would
not be able to tell the difference between a “new” and a “changed” term.
Excelling
MultiTerm even enables you to delete terms, languages, or entries in MultiTerm
directly from the Excel file, or to select exactly which fields should be read
back and which ones should be left alone in MultiTerm. And, of course,
Excelling MultiTerm allows you to generate new entries, terms, languages etc.
So it can be used to import carefully prepared data in complex structures, or
add new languages, for instance.
Disseminating Terminology
Once your
termbase has reached a certain size, other applications will want to leverage
this data. Software developers want to use it to auto-correct wrong string
input. Authoring systems or CMSs want to synchronize it but map it to a totally
different logical structure. Even static outputs such as PDF glossaries are
sometimes required.
With Publishing MultiTerm, you can filter
exactly the content you want to export, and then transform it over and over
again, until you reach the required target format in XML, CSV, PDF etc. Once such
a conversion task has been defined, you can automatically run it in defined
intervals to make sure your target systems are always up to date.
Any Questions?
Interested?
We are always happy to answer your questions.
There’s
also a free trial of Excelling MultiTerm at SDL OpenExchange!
Or do you
have a special request that we have not yet covered in our toolset? Let us know, we´ll see what we can do for you!
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