General Terminology

Is there a location on this community site where I can ask terminology-related questions?

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  • An entry exists in our termbase for the English (US) term "associate". Our French Canadian linguistic reviewer notified me that depending upon the context, there may be three different ways of translating this term as "employé", "associé", or "collaborateur". What is the best way to enter this information? Should I enter the English (US) term three times with a different FR-CA translation and note in the Context attribute the usage or is it possible to have one English (US) entry for this term and enter the FR-CA translation three times?

    Is this the best way to handle this situation or is there another way?

    Thanks for your help!
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  • Can I ask....are all three of those different ways of using the word "associate" used in your content?
  • First, i am not a terminology expert, but i do work with one and pay close attention to what is recommended, additionally i've confirmed his approach with other sources as the best way to do terminoloy.

    That said, when working with worldserver termbases you have two levels of organization, an entry (which holds many terms) and a term which is specific to a given language.

    The approach that i am told and believe is appropriate is the idea of a concept based terminology where you separate even your source terms from the concept and then add the terms to that entry.

    In our implementation we have an entry that describes the concept that we are tracking and then all terms that apply to this concept are then added to that entry. To differentiate differing words that describe a single concept we use additional attributes (create by us using the WS UI) that detail the usage, context, part of speech etc.

    So to answer your question.

    I would recommend an entry which will serve as your concept where you define specifically what an associate is. And then in that entry create an english term for associate, then create three fr-CA terms in that entry as well and then use an attribute to define the context in which each should be used.

    Hope this is helpful
  • Hi Bobbie,

    It is a very interesting topic. Since it has been a question for me too somehow, I have just done a small test as below.
    - Creating one entry with 3 terms in French (one-to-three)
    - Creating three entries for each pair (one-to-one)

    As the screenshot shows, there is no big different on BWB.

        

    However in Studio, it looks different as below.

      

    Either way, the term recognition could work correctly. So I think there is no big difference in those two styles so far, but some considerations as I wrote below.
    When I tried to create the three entries in one-to-one style, I was prompted by a warning by WorldServer as:
        This term has previously been proposed: associate(Approved)
    Because of this warning, I can assume WorldServer is expecting terms are created in one-to-multi style.

    Another consideration is, when you work with Excel files for the terms by exporting and importing.
    If you are collecting new terms in your local Excel file, and you import it to WorldServer sometimes, we should carefully determine which style is the best.
    If you export one-to-multi style in "Delimited File: Simple Format", it will be a CSV as below, that means you need to create your Excel in a same manner.

    English (United States) French (France)
    associate employé;associé;collaborateur

    For one-to-one style, it will be:

    English (United States) French (France)
    associate collaborateur
    associate employé
    associate associé

    So I think one-to-one style might be handy for us, when we need to think about import/export.

    Of course, there are some other considerations like in case of using attributes, TD Groups, etc.

    Best,
    Taiki

  • Hello Taiki.

    Thank you for your very thorough analysis.  You are absolutely correct that there are issues with the export functionality. I tested the one-to-many scenario, exporting as a Delimited file and a CSV file.  The Delimited format did not export any of the translations. The CSV format exported only the first translation; omitting the other two translations.

    Nevertheless, as you point out, there is an issue with the one-to-one scenario during input, where WorldServer is indicating that multiple entries for the source term exist -- message:  "This term has previously been proposed: associate(Approved)". Therefore, the best format I think is the one-to-many scenario as:  

    This will solve the input part of this issue however, I still need to research the best method to export so that all translations for a source term are exported correctly.

  • With regards to exporting, it really is a question of how you want to manage your data and more specifically, what tool. If you want to use excel then csv is the way to go, however as is noted above, csv does not handle multi valued data elements very well (which is what an entry is).

    However, even without customization, you can run your terms through term-based worldserver workflows to perform actions on them without ever taking them out of the tool.

    But if you need to export, what i would suggest is using the tbx format. It is an industry format approved by the ISO

    www.iso.org/.../catalogue_detail.htm

    Any terminology tool worth it's salt will allow both importing and exporting of terminolgy data. And this format (which is essentially xml) handles multivalue data elements without issue.