The language services industry is made up of professionals who perform a multitude of different tasks. The business process of an assignment, from the moment a request is received to the delivery of the final translation and beyond, involves a large number of different linguistic tasks that are required in order to obtain successful results, but also to optimize processes and speed up production rates in the short, medium and long term. As is well known, these tasks are not only related to cross-linguistic conversion activities, which normally involve translation, revision or monolingual proofreading (in addition to their respective quality controls), but also include administrative, communication and resource management tasks. Together, all these functions make up a large cog in the current machinery of the translation industry, without which it is impossible to understand this professional activity in this age of globalization and digitalization. Of course, although these terms are typically mentioned in relation to translation agencies, most freelancers must also perform these tasks individually or by using specific professionals. Nowadays, reality imposes a series of management tasks that are necessary to correctly maintain this professional activity. Language services are becoming an essential requirement for many companies and, as clients, they need the guarantee that their translation partner always follows the same guidelines and has the same reference resources in mind at all times. This is where a door opens to a number of new roles within the industry. That is why in today’s article we are going to talk about one of these many roles that are almost entirely new but are becoming indispensable to the language services industry. Specifically, today we will take a look at language profiles relating to terminology management. In other words, today we will explain the job of the terminologist, what it is and what its main functions are. To begin with, we should consider that, normally, the terminologist is a figure that is not usually found as a dedicated profile, that is, it is not common to find language service professionals who are exclusively dedicated to terminology management. This is usually a hybrid position performed by the translators and reviewers themselves, or by the technical teams in translation agencies, in conjunction with other complementary tasks, or even by the management department, depending on how the processes and responsibilities are structured. Terminologists are therefore professionals with a high level of technical knowledge and the sensitivity required for cross-linguistic correlation tasks. In essence, the terminologist’s job is to carry out terminology management. This can be understood as management at either the internal or external level.
In the first scenario, they would be in charge of creating glossaries with terminology preferences or correspondences to be taken into account within the company, normally with the aim of unifying the criteria to follow and ensure that, regardless of the translator handling a project, the terminology decisions taken for projects of the same type remain the same. From the point of view of external translation, terminologists receive terminology requests from clients or create an entirely new set of guidelines based on the indications they receive or the decisions that are made during translations. In both cases, they are responsible for creating glossaries, which they convert into monolingual and multilingual terminology databases (with definitions, instructions for use, contextual explanation, etc.). Of course, other tasks are implicit in the creation of these resources, such as maintenance, updates, cleaning and merging. Terminologists also act as a bridge between clients and translators, as they can often pass on doubts from the translator to the client in order to clarify concepts as well as notifying translators regarding a set of preferences. Furthermore, in addition to terminology arising from specific projects, terminologists may work on the development of specific glossaries on demand for a given industrial field, researching different publications from which they collect terminological correspondences for later use. On a day-to-day basis, terminologists are in contact with experts in different subjects, act as leaders in terminology management teams, prepare seminars and courses to teach this task to their colleagues and, more importantly, incorporate these resources into translation software tools. This would play the role of quality control, as it allows translators to check whether the terms included in the glossary have been translated as specified in the project, thus increasing quality assurance.
In order to be able to perform these functions, terminologists need to possess specific skills and knowledge. First, they need to be familiar with the scope of terminology and its applicability in the industry, as well as master linguistic competencies including language knowledge, cross-language matching in corpuses and other resources, and other skills including communication skills, organization and thoroughness.
In terms of technical components, they should develop competencies in the use of databases and terminology memories, as they will also be responsible for the alignment of texts to create corpuses for internal use. In general, a master level of specific translation programs is required for the implementation of the resources that are created.
The figure of the terminologist is essential for the evolution of a company towards more fluid, precise and professional dynamics, in order to generate translations that guarantee much greater consistency and demonstrate a longer-term commitment to clients.
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