July 1, 2010 – “TermWiki is an innovative answer to an old and persistent question: How to provide a structured environment for managing terminology in organizations that typically don’t have a high level of linguistic expertise? TermWiki offers the powerful multilingual management and tracking features large organizations require and yet is so easy to use that anyone with the most rudimentary computer skills will be comfortable with this system within minutes.

Terminology Management in the Cloud

The biggest difference between a traditional documents-based terminology management approach and TermWiki’s centralized web-centric paradigm is the fact that with TermWiki, e-mailing Excel documents back and forth between terminology stakeholders is a thing of the past. Any term that a user enters into the system is available to all other users in the entire organization. And the value of giving visibility to all terminology assets an organization owns by storing them all in one place cannot be overemphasized: Centralized management of terminology ensures that all internal users (e.g. employees) and external users (clients, partners, and service providers) of terminology have easy access not only to the complete dataset, but also to the latest version of it.

Instantly Familiar User Interface

As one of the goals of the TermWiki project was to make the user experience of this new terminology management system as intuitive as possible, building on the proven MediaWiki platform was an obvious choice. Users of TermWiki are immediately familiar with the wiki interface that features a task-oriented layout where all major items are in plain view and immediately accessible. In TermWiki, any user will be able to make a valid contribution within minutes of their first use.

Access Terminology from any Computer

With TermWiki, it doesn’t matter if users have a PC, MAC, Linux or other operating system, and there is no need to install and maintain any special software. The only software required for searching, entering, editing, translating, approving, and downloading terminology is a web browser. This makes TermWiki a truly universal terminology management tool. And not only are all terms visible to every employee in the organization (depending on their user privileges), but everyone works on the same data set and in real time. With TermWiki, organizations can use glossaries as the powerful, comprehensive knowledge bases that they are.

Predefined Data Categories Support Consistency

TermWiki has been designed by members of CSOFT’s engineering team. CSOFT is the largest language service provider in Asia, and therefore, these developers are intimately familiar with the language needs of global organizations large and small. This is why TermWiki goes far beyond the simple word pair model used in many glossaries that often leaves open more questions than it answers. At the same time, the developers of TermWiki also wanted to create a system that doesn’t require its users to have a Ph.D. in linguistics. This is why TermWiki offers a small number of predefined data categories that have been carefully selected for their relevance to global communication projects, e.g. Definition, Part of Speech, Usage Status, Company, Product, etc. Many of these data categories even have pick lists for users to choose a value from, e.g. Part of Speech has Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Proper Noun, and Other to speed up data entry and to ensure consistency across entries.”

Click here to read the full article.