Terminology Guide in TextUnited

Effective terminology management is crucial for maintaining consistency and quality across translation projects. Here's a guide to understanding and utilizing key terminology features and rules within the TextUnited platform:

Image 1 - To access your terminology management tools navigate to "Terminology" from the main menu

1. Terminology Repository

A Terminology Repository in TextUnited serves as a centralized database where specific terms and their approved translations are stored. This ensures that all translators and stakeholders use consistent terminology across all projects. You can access, edit terms and import terms in your repository as the account administrator.

2. Importing Terminology

To populate your Terminology Repository, you can import terms from a CSV file. This process involves mapping the columns of your CSV to the corresponding languages and fields in TextUnited, allowing for efficient integration of existing terminology databases. A specific format is required to import your file to TextUnited, to learn more about it, click here.

3. Sharing Terminology Repositories

Collaboration is enhanced by sharing your Terminology Repository with team members or external partners. This feature ensures that everyone involved in a project has access to the same set of approved terms, maintaining consistency and reducing errors.

4. Terminology Extraction

TextUnited's Terminology Extraction Tool automatically identifies and collects key terms from your source and target files. This feature streamlines the creation of the Project Glossary by extracting relevant terms from existing documents. 

5. Utilizing Terminology in Projects

Once your Terminology Repository is established, TextUnited integrates these terms into the translation workflow. During automated pre-translation, preferred terms are enforced automatically. Additionally, for projects which involve translators, the terms are also suggested in the Translation Editor, ensuring adherence to preferred terminology and enhancing the overall quality of the translation. Upon the completion of projects, the terms that were translated in your project's glossary or that were added by the translators will be added to your account's repository.

6. Terminology enforcement

In TextUnited, terminology enforcement is a key feature designed to maintain consistency and accuracy across all translation projects with automatic translation by ensuring the use of preferred terms. Below is a guide of terminology enforcement rules that we recommend you to read before you start utilizing this feature.

Image 2 - Terms manager allows you to change status of terms

Terminology enforcement rules

The system will check the status of terms before using them in automated translation. To improve automated translation using pre-defined terminology, please ensure that:

• You have an active subscription plan that supports terminology enforcement in automatic translation
• The terms in your account's terminology are set to “Preferred” for all language pairs you intend to use (e.g., EN-DE). Click here to learn how to change the status of your terms

Terminology from projects and term statuses

• Translated terms from the project's glossary will be automatically added to your account's terminology repository after project completion
• Terminology that has been translated in the project's glossary and approved by the project manager or in-country reviewer will be automatically have the status "preferred" after the project is completed
• Terminology that has been translated in the project's glossary but not approved by the Project manager or In-country reviewer will have "accepted" status in your terminology repository
• Terms with the "accepted" status will not be enforced in automatic translation
• Only terms with the "preferred" status will be enforced in automatic translation
• 'Accepted terms' are entered by translators through a project workflow (in the Translation Editor and Glossary package) or by users through terminology CSV file imports.
  These terms then enter a review workflow, where terminologists and in-country reviewers assess and potentially upgrade them to 'Preferred' status. This process allows for the addition of crucial metadata, improving the terms' effectiveness for translators and AI-powered translation.

Domains in TextUnited

Depending on the domain of the project and the domain of the terms, there will be different results in terminology enforcement of the pre-translated content in your project. Please see the table below to better understand how domains will impact terminology enforcement of your project:

• If the domain of the project and the terms is "undefined", all terms will be enforced in pre-translation
• If the domain of the project and terms is specified, only the terms from the same domain will be enforced in pre-translation
• If the domain of the project is specified but the terms have an "undefined" domain, then they will not be enforced in pre-translation

Project’s domain	Term domain	Terminology enforcement in pre-translation with automated translations*	Terminology proposals in the Translation Editor (projects which involve human translators)
Undefined	Undefined	All terms	All terms
Undefined	Specified	All terms	All terms
Specified	Undefined	Only with specified terms	All terms
Specified	Specified	Only with specified terms	Only specified terms will be available

*Automated translation - An automated translation process which combines your translation memories, NMT engines and LLMs that are used:

• to pre-translate your files within a TextUnited project
• to translate files automatically on-demand (on-the-fly translation)
• to pre-translate content via API endpoints