Processing terminology for the translation pipeline

Companies must translate their content if they want to operate multinationally. Both quality and speed of translation are key factors in determining market share in the target market. Proactively managing terminology, including pre-translating key terms for a translation project, has beneficial effects on these factors. However, in commercial environments, the volumes of content and subsequently of the required terminology are typically large. Therefore, integrating terminology into the translation pipeline requires a process that is as automated as possible. Term extraction is the cornerstone of this process, but to maximize efficiency it requires a post-processing strategy that repurposes existing lexical resources. Terms extracted from corpora and subsequently translated should be channeled into the company termbase so that they can be leveraged for other purposes. These and other effective practices for processing extracted terms are discussed, based on the author’s experiences in one large company.