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SDL MultiTerm as a mere translation productivity tool or a real terminology management asset?

PCT Translation Division

As a terminologist, I do not think it is appropriate to categorize "SDL MultiTerm Ideas" under "Translation Productivity Ideas".

It would be more appropriate to have "MultiTerm Ideas" linked to a Terminology management category, along with Multiterm Extract, for example.

The future of terminology lies in ontology building and knowledge management and the "Translation Productivity" category seems too restrictive. Unless SDL envisages to limit the role of MultiTerm to a translation tool, a mere appendage of Studio.

I'd like to have your opinion on this topic.

Philippe Rouquet

 

 
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  • Hi Philippe,

    SDL MultiTerm is a real terminology management asset for the terminologist persona (as well as feeding into the work of many other personas, such as tranlsators or localization project managers). We have had many internal conversations on where terminology management belongs at the end of the day. It's everywhere - in Enterprise standalone, in Enterprise as part of a translation management solution, in LSPs and Corps standalone, as part of all translation productivity solutions in Corp/LSP/Freelance, as part of software localization flows, in Language Cloud etc. etc. And as you say it also belongs in the authoring/knowledge management space - and the list and use scenarios don't stop there.
    Now, when we look at SDL internally, what used to be the 'Trados' products now belong to "Translation Productivity" group. As part of that, MultiTerm also moved under that group in the mid-2000s. But the same people - me included :) - continue focussing on terminology management as a separate use case, as we have done in the past.
    So, maybe what we can say is that the name "Translation Productivity" is a bit unfortunate, and maybe reflects a bit too much how we are organised internally. In an ideal world, our group would indeed be called "Translation Productivity, Terminology Management and Software Localization". That would be a bit of a mouthful, however. So we shorten it to "Translation Productivity". Maybe we could consider "Trados" as well :). In any event, we are looking at our product set more and more at a strategic portfolio level, and as part of that, we might see other changes in future. (For instance, why not consider an integration from MultiTerm into our Knowledge Center product, using the new REST API in MultiTerm 2017?)

    I hope this clarifies the situation and the decision to put it here under Translation Productivity at least to some extent.

    Thanks
    Daniel
  • in reply to Daniel Brockmann
    Many thanks for your insights Daniel. We, the corporate users of MultiTerm, find it sometimes difficut to follow the marketing logic of SDL, and it's always useful to have an historical perspective.
    Now, I would concur with you on the envisaged integration in the knowledge center, because I would say (and I think I would not be the only one) that the future of MultiTerm is about multilingual knowledge management.
    Philippe R.