Terminology Style Guide

A terminology style guide creates standards and is the centerpiece of good terminology work. It is absolutely vital, as it assures the high quality and consistency of your terminology resources. What would standardizing terminology work be without a mandatory set of rules that is accepted throughout the whole company?

It is therefore useful and necessary in respect of standardization of corporate terminology to build a set of rules that includes specifications and information on the following topics:

  • Important basic principles of terminology science
  • Rules concerning spelling, term formation and grammar (source language and, if required, target language)
  • Criteria for term evaluation
  • Termbase structure (data categories and picklist values=
  • Rules for creating definitions, context sentences, references
  • Roles and workflows within terminology work

What is important to know is that there is not the one and only terminology style guide that can be passed on from company to company. Such a style guide needs to be tailored to the specific needs and requirements of your company to have the desired effect. This means that the aforementioned criteria and categories can vary from style guide to style guide and, of course, rules can be included which are specific to the terminology work in your company and preferred in your organization.

Compounds

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No hyphen

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  • open compound:
    user interface
  • closed compound:
    firewall
  • containing formula symbols:
    CO2sensor
  • containing abbreviations:
    CPU performance

Hyphen

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  • compounds containing single letters:
    V-belt
  • compounds containing numbers:
    3-way valve
  • compound adjectives
    corrosion-resistant

Brand and product names

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Abbreviations

i

acronyms

shortened forms

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Based on an analysis of your company-specific terminology, we will collaborate with you to draw up useful style guide contents and linguistic and terminological rules that are custom-fit to your company. Referring to concrete examples in the style guide (terms, concepts, texts) that are actually used in your company, will help it gain acceptance throughout the company, and this, in turn, is an important basis for successful corporate terminology work.

Our service portfolio regarding terminology style guides includes

  • analyzing the term formation patterns within your company by means of term extraction
  • deriving and drawing up rules on orthography, term formation and grammar
  • creating visuals of these rules and short versions of the style guide as separate documents, e. g. in the form of a wiki or graphics
  • modeling terminological processes and workflows

This makes the terminology style guide the essential requirement for the implementation of terminology work in your company and for creating comprehensive terminology resources in the form of a database. The terminology extracted from a representative text corpus that is used for the formation of rules often serves as the first data to to be incorporated in the new termbase.

Generally, we create terminology style guides for the German language, and, if required, for the English language, too. For other languages, individual rules can be added upon request.