LocTerms

This status report gives statistics that illustrate my progress with the LocTerms glossary as of March 20, 2024. The statistics are followed by discussion about my work.

• Number of concept entries: 67
• Number of new entries in EN-US: 24
• Number of new entries in ES-MX: 1
• Number of translated entries: 35
• Number of semi-validated entries in EN-US: 0
• Number of semi-validated entries in ES-MX: 9
• Number of fully validated entries: 5

Note: You can review the meaning of the status labels of New, Translated, Semi-Validated, and Validated in the Glossary Structure blog post.

Discussion about statistics

• The number of new entries in EN-US as compared to ES-MX illustrates the fact that English is handled as the de facto source language and Spanish as the de facto target language in this glossary, despite the fact that terminology work is not an act of translation. Terminology work is the act of building up terminology independently in each of the languages of a glossary and then determining the levels of correspondence among the concepts.
• The status label of Semi-Validated has been added to the glossary structure to denote where a definition or a context for the head term in one of the two languages has been documented in the concept entry. The number of semi-validated entries in ES-MX as compared to EN-US illustrates the research needed to determine the corresponding term in my non-native language.
• The fully validated entries in the glossary were achieved through a comparison of ISO 9000 in English to its Spanish translation. A number of national standards organizations that represent Spanish-speaking countries worked together on the translation of ISO 9000 in order to standardize terminology use around quality management in Spanish. Mexico’s standardization body participated in this process (2015: Prólogo de la versión en español). Because these standardization bodies worked together to translation ISO 9000 with the specific goal of standardizing Spanish terminology, the translations will be followed in my work.

Discussion about terminology

• In this round of work, my research focused upon defining core starter terminology, such as mother language (which I prefer to native language). I found an interesting definition for “lengua materna” that discusses how the mother languages and dialects that we speak help us to form part of our identities by telling us which groups we belong to (Castaño 2008: Los españoles en México y el español de México: extractos de psicología dialectal).
• Some terminology specific to Mexico (or Latin America) has been distinguished from the terminology used in Spain, including the abbreviation EUA instead of EE. UU. for USA, and the use of computadora instead of ordenador in the term for CAT: traducción traducida por computadora (TAC).
• I added the label of Role to the subject list within the Glossary Structure. In researching the translation of localizer I found a few professionals on LinkedIn from Mexico who refer to themselves as localizador or localizadora. I did not search for anyone referring to themselves as localizadore, though I did add this non-binary option for the concept to the glossary.

Areas for Improvement

• The first fifty or so entries in the termbase build upon one another in a logical way by starting with mother language, translation, and localization and building upon the terminology according to conceptual relations from there. Later entries in the termbase could be better organized so that they are grouped together with the earlier concept entries with which the later entries share a concept relation.
• As discussed, terminology work is not a practice of translation and building a corpus of ES-MX content (or ES content more generally) and then conducting terminology extraction and studying conceptual relations prior to recording terms in concept entries in the glossary would be preferred. Substantial rework may be needed later based upon the methodology I’m currently employing of taking content I’ve written and preparing it for translation by identifying terms in the English and then researching the “equivalent” in the target language. The LocTerms glossary is therefore biased toward the terminology and names for concepts that I use.