Unexpected ROI
from terminology
Business
Janaina Wittner
Personal experience shows that all localization
clients are interested in terminology — without
exception. Only very large organizations, however,
actually seem to maintain terminology databases.
When our salespeople ask new prospects about
this, they often get an answer along the lines of
“We tried to put something like that in place, but
then just abandoned the whole thing,” usually
because nobody had the time or the budget or felt
responsible to maintain it. And yet, without constant maintenance, any form of terminology management is doomed to failure. Then again, if most
companies do without it, who really cares?
The size and overall use ratio of Google allow us to use the
search engine for a basic public opinion poll. When I typed “
importance of terminology” (in quotes) into the Google search field, I got
exactly 888 entries. That isn’t much, but still a lot more than one
would get from searching for something such as “ROI from terminology,” which generated zero entries, whatever word combination
or alternative formulation I used. When I ran a second search with
ROI (return on investment) alone, I got about 11 million entries.
This quick test shows that many people seem to feel fairly
concerned about ROI, but almost none expect it to come from
terminology. By the way, ROI far outranked most other buzzwords
in modern business management, such as cost savings ( 5 million), time to market ( 3 million) or business performance (1.5
million), and there were almost 200,000 pages discussing ROI
tools, with nearly a dozen new ones appearing every day.
Janaina Wittner, regional manager for Central
and Eastern Europe at WhP, holds a master’s
degree in operations management and has
more than ten years’ worth of experience in
the localization industry.
Although the actual value of this simple test is arguable, it
at least illustrates that ROI is among the top concerns in the
business world, and that almost every cubic inch in each and
every business sphere has now been analyzed to make sure it
generates a decent amount of ROI — with the very exception of
terminology. Even though terminology by itself seems reasonably well known — you get almost half as many Google entries
( 46. 9 million) as you get with ROI — no respected business
expert seems to consider terminology management as a means
with which to generate ROI.
Linguists themselves are seldom known for their interest in
finance, and company management will consider their linguists
as a cost. This may partly explain why very few people ever
tried to put hard figures on ROI from terminology management.
There are a few other reasons, however, and looking at them
will help us better understand the needs.
Over time, terminology has almost become an allegory for quality. If you open any of the 888 Google entries where terminology
is recognized as being important, the authors mostly talk about
improved quality at multiple stages of the content production
chain. The most commonly shared view is that terminology helps
to “improve the quality of the content” and, indirectly, “customer
satisfaction.” Some articles try to push matters a bit further, finding
more areas where terminology management would have a positive
impact. A few even try to figure out how to quantify all of this, but
none of them come up with any actual figures.
If terminology specialists share the view that terminology
has a purely qualitative impact, it is by no means surprising
that business experts only concerned with hard figures ignore
the matter completely. As most localization managers working
in large corporations probably already know, anyone who has
tried to sell terminology management to upper management
will have noticed that the very first question he or she is asked
after finishing a presentation is “What does it cost, and what is
the ROI within one to three years?”
It is the standard question when you ask your boss for money
to launch a new project. In such a situation, you shouldn’t
bore him or her with long explanations about inconsistency
