Excerpt from Donald A. DePalma’s blog entry on CSOFT’s TermWiki: “CSOFT announced TermWiki, a multilingual terminology management solution based on wiki technology. As a wiki, it is web-based, supports collaboration out of the box, and provides users with a familiar interface for managing a terminology database. The company hopes to overcome traditional objections to systematic term management.

Our research consistently finds that terminology management is one of those practices that everyone knows that they should be doing better, more systematically, or even just doing at all — but don’t (see” The Case for Terminology Management,” Feb09). We regularly encounter companies where terminology has jumped the tracks. For example, one manufacturer found that it used 120 variations of a product name, while another employed a different term in a truck repair manual than the component a mechanic could actually order from the parts depot. These cases represent the tip of the iceberg for the absence of formal terminology management in product development, documentation, marketing, and support.

So why don’t companies do a better job managing their terminology as part of their intellectual property? In these budget-straining times, a terminologist and supporting technology might be more than companies want to spend. For others, term management has as much appeal as a colonoscopy. In most cases, though, it’s the combination of terminology management software’s high cost, low levels of usability, and limited ability to integrate the solution that limit demand.

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