Under Community Review

Term abbreviation should be part of database definition

 A number of our clients use a lot of inhouse abbreviations the meaning of which we need to keep in our terminology files. SDL Support team helped me convert such a file into an SDL termbase, however, I was surprised they used kind of a workaround. The abbreviation columns had to be entered as languages, i.e. synonyms for the terms themselves. Therefore, if an abbreviation from the database is recognized in the source text, Studio does not show what the abbreviation stands for in the source language but shows its meaning in the target language and the corresponding abbreviation. The meaning in the source language can be seen only via the View term details icon. However, it surprises me that such a workaround has to be used in a professional tool while other tools (e.g. Transit) have abbreviations as part of their termbase definition and you can use this field or leave it empty. when importing or creating termbase entries. Then all the fields that are not empty are shown when the term is contained in the source text.

  • In MultiTerm termbases, you will typically indeed enter abbreviations or acronyms as synonyms and then add a picklist field as reqwuired that categorises the synonym as an abbreviation. I would not see this as a workaround but rather an implementation of synonym autonomy.