Translation

Terminology management

File prep

Solutions for Terminology Management

Terminology management is one of the key factors leading to successful localization of a software application, where you need to make sure of using the UI terms consistently among the software strings and documents. For a large-scale project where more than one translator translates many files, appropriate tools and knowhow are required for terminology management.

Tools for Terminology Management

We have developed our own tools for terminology management, which include:

• Term marking and extracting tool -- You mark terms manually but in a very efficient way. The marked terms are automatically extracted to a term list.
• Automatic term extracting tool -- A tool designed based on ChaSen, a Japanese morphological analyzer developed by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. The tool can automatically extract nouns and compound nouns from a Japanese text. See below.
• Term checking tool -- A tool that checks the terms used in the translation against a termbase.

With these tools, we can manage the terminology through the entire project systematically, from creation of a term list to verification of translated terms.

Workflow of Terminology Management

We not only manage the terminology at the initial translation stage but also do it at a later stage when all translation files are gathered, so that we can find fluctuations in the terms used in the entire project, check the terms against the termbase, and make necessary changes for consistency.
The following figure shows our workflow of terminology management.

Morphological Analysis

When you want to systematically process a natural language, to extract the terms from a translated file for instance, you need a natural language processing tool like a morphological analyzer. Morphological analysis is a technique to identify the smallest linguistic units, or parts-of-speech, of a sentence. We utilize this technique to extract the nouns and compound nouns from Japanese translation for various purposes.

Example of morphological analysis -- extracting all nouns

The following example shows a list of nouns and compound nouns automatically extracted from translated Japanese files.