Microsoft Language Portal Blog

We've moved!

2008-10-31T20:43:00Z

Britta Simon has left our terminology team to move to a new exciting opportunity in Microsoft.

Britta was our blog owner so we are taking the opportunity to move to new digs so more members from our "Language Excellence" team can blog.

The new address is http://blogs.technet.com/terminology/ so come on over and join us :-)

Are you a Greek, Slovak, Slovenian or Ukrainian Visio or Project User?

2008-07-30T00:09:00Z

We are currently conducting terminology community forums for Greek, Slovak, Slovenian, and Ukrainian. The forums contain Visio and Project terminology (as in Microsoft Office product family applications). We are conducting the forums since Microsoft Office Project and Visio will soon be translated into several Eastern European languages for the first time. We want to ensure that the project specific translations we chose are 100% market-appropriate. This is why we are looking for speakers of these languages who are familiar with the applications - if they access our terminology community forums, they will be able to give us feedback on the proposed translations and to thus influence the terminology that is used in their markets. If you are a speaker of Greek, Slovak, Slovenian, or Ukrainian, and if you have used Project or Visio in the past, please contact us at trmquest@microsoft.com to obtain the terminology community project access info and access code.

Efharisto poli - Ďakujem Vám - Hvala vam - Spasibi!

Give Feedback on Terminology used in Office 2007 and Windows Vista

2008-07-11T23:46:00Z

We just opened another Microsoft Terminology Community Forum. The forum includes terminology that was used in Office 2007 and Windows Vista. If you speak one of the following languages, please consider giving us feedback on the translations we used in your market: Arabic, Brazilian-Portuguese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

Your feedback will be reviewed by our language specialists and local market experts who will update our terminology glossary accordingly. The updated terminology will then be considered for inclusion in the next version of Office and Windows.

Arabic

Brazilian-Portuguese

Chinese (simplified)

Chinese (traditional)

To enter suggestions, you need to first sign in using your Windows Live ID. If you don't have one yet, you will find out how to do this during the sign in process. Afterwards, you will be able to view the glossary and the links you need to click on in order to enter a new translation or to vote for an existing term. You will be prompted to register for the project before you can actively contribute. During the registration process, you create a "friendly name" that will be associated with your votes, comments, and translation suggestions. We will display the friendly names of the top contributors on the Terminology Community Forum page once the project is completed. To see an example, check out our Dutch "Thank you" page for our last terminology project, Windows Live.

Once you have signed-in and registered, you will be able to leave your feedback. The forums will be open for community participation until August 22.

Microsoft Glossary and Terminology Database Access

2008-07-03T00:11:00Z

Microsoft offers the following terminology resources to its customers:

· Key terminology and shipped strings are available for live search using the Microsoft Language Portal Search Tool.

· For MSDN and TechNet subscribers, full product glossaries in CSV format are available for download on MSDN.

Microsoft Language Portal features an online search tool that provides customers with access to our terminology databases. The tool enables access to our terminology databases that contain English terms, their definitions, and their translations. The database also contains software strings from released products. The search tool supports terminology lookup from English into selected target languages and terminology lookup from a target language into English.

To download our full product glossaries in CSV format, customers need either an MSDN subscription or a standard TechNet subscription.

Note to MSDN and TechNet Subscribers:

Full product glossaries can be accessed as follows:

1.	Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ or http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions.
2.	Use the Click here link in the box on the right to sign in to your account.
3.	Select the Downloads tab.
4.	Navigate to Tools and Resources\Microsoft Translation Glossaries.

Language Portal Search Tool - Bidirectional Search Enabled!

2008-07-02T23:52:00Z

The Language Portal Search Tool now offers bidirectional search functionality. Up to this month, search was only possible from English to target language. Going forward, it is also possible to look up English terms entering a target term into the search text box. When using target to English search, the name of the target language needs to be selected in the drop down list entitled "Language" (same as for English to target search). Then check the checkbox "Reverse search direction".

Step-by-step description of reverse search:

1. In the search text box, enter a non-English IT term, for example "klicken" (the German term for English "click").

2. In the language drop down list, select the language affiliated with the non-English search term (in this case, "German").

3. Select the check-box "Reverse search direction".

4. Click on the "Search" icon.

The search tool will now display the English term(s) and strings associated with German "klicken".

Language Portal article published in PressPass

2008-06-12T01:07:00Z

We are in the process of determining Language Portal features that should be implemented in the future. It is pretty easy to find out what people think about the content and tools we currently offer on our site, however, determining what additional content or features should be included is more difficult. I personally like sites that have dynamic content, preferably content largely created by more than one writer, and with regards to tools: the more, the better. If you have any input on what you would like to see added to our site, please let us know using the Feedback Tool we have on the portal.

If you are interested in details on why we look for community feedback on our terminology and why we designed the Language Portal, please check out the article "Helping Software Go Local" in Microsoft PressPass.

Society for Technical Communication (STC) 2008 National Conference

2008-06-09T19:29:00Z

By Robin Lombard, Terminology Research Manager, Microsoft Corporation

I attended and presented at the Society for Technical Communication (STC) 2008 National Conference in Philadelphia, PA from June 1-4, 2008. There were probably fewer than 1,000 attendees at this conference from a range of backgrounds: writers, editors, translators, publication managers, independent contractors, etc. Vendors of various content management systems and localization/globalization services also attended.

The keynote was given by Howard Rheingold, who coined the term “virtual community” and has written many books about computers and communication. He’s a very good speaker; he’s been on the Internet from the time it began. Take a look at his web site from the link above, and you can see that he is a character. His talk made me think that I need a smart phone so that I can stay connected all the time, and maybe even twitter.

I was asked to speak at the Microsoft Content Publishing Institute part of the conference, a series of five presentations about content publishing at Microsoft. I spoke about the history of terminology management at Microsoft – basically, how we went from simple isolated glossaries in the late 1990s to terminology management as it is now. You can find my presentation on the STC conference site in the Sessions\Session Materials section).

Many people came to the session and asked lots and lots of questions. It seems that many companies are trying to be more efficient in translation/localization. I had a comment from a German translator thanking us for the Language Portal, and questions about our team size, qualifications for doing terminology work, and how we worked with writers and editors. I really enjoyed talking to these people.

University of Washington Lecture

2008-05-16T02:13:00Z

By Robin Lombard, Terminology Research Manager, Microsoft Corporation

On Tuesday, May 13, 2008 I gave a lecture to a class of University of Washington students who are enrolled in the Technical Communications program. The class is a graduate seminar with a different theme each quarter – this time it is content publishing and user design. The university invited five people from Microsoft to lecture about their work and to come back a week later to lead a discussion about the topic they lectured on.

My lecture was entitled “Terminology Management at Microsoft”. I started with a definition of terminology management (The investigation, documentation, and consistent reuse of terms and their associated concepts) and very briefly covered some of the essential literature and theory. I tried to spend most of my 50 minutes talking about why terminology management is needed and providing examples from my experience with Microsoft terminology.

Class professor David Farkas said he really liked the lecture (I’m not so sure about the students), and he gave me some hints about how to get a discussion going with the class next week. For example, he suggested I think about how there are two types of students: those concentrating on content and those concentrating on design. So a student will want to know about how our team interacts with usability experts, and what sort of processes we have for ensuring that usable terminology is also globally-appropriate terminology. I probably should also tell them about our localizability/globalization alias.

Here’s hoping I can get the students engaged in a discussion about what I think is a fascinating field…

Windows Live Terminology Community Forum Open for Participation

2008-04-11T22:33:00Z

Dear friends,

Are you interested in terminology and the translations of social networking terms? My team just opened a new Terminology Community Forum for you to participate in, and I would like to extend an invitation to you to influence the terminology in localized Windows Live products through the Microsoft Terminology Community Forum. This forum is designed to allow you to vote or comment on how terminology used in Microsoft products is translated into your language.

We have a list of 40-80 Windows Live terms for a number of languages with a focus on social networking terminology (Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces), and we’d be interested in hearing what you think. Are the terms…

current?
appealing?
easy to understand?
technically correct?

We believe so, but on occasion we receive feedback that our terminology differs from the terminology already established by communities that use our products. This may occur, for example, as a language evolves over time. Using terminology that closely reflects the local culture is an important goal for Microsoft.

Windows Live terminology community projects are open for participation in a fully localized environment in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese (Brazil).

Windows Live terminology community projects are also available in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Click the link for your language, or go to the main Microsoft Terminology Community Forum portal. For more information on these Terminology Community Forums, please check out my blog post from September 14th.

Your involvement in Terminology Community Forums and your comments on this initiative are greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Britta

Microsoft Language Portal is Live!

2008-04-04T00:09:00Z

Dear friends,

Good news: The Microsoft Language Portal is live in 11 languages! The site contains information, resources and tools that will hopefully be of use for you. Here are some of the top features:

A search tool that allows you to search for English terms and shipped software strings in more than 90 languages
More than 30 style guides are available on the site for you to download for free
A feedback tool for you to use to give us your feedback on any term used in any of our products and technologies
Information on our terminology processes
Information on upcoming events and interesting terms

You may access the site in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian) or Russian.

These are the languages our site is currently available in, however, our tools and resources support more languages. If the Language Portal has not been localized into your language yet, please visit it choosing the language you are most comfortable with. And let us know what you think - we will be updating the site on a regular basis. We need your feedback to ensure that the Language Portal will be optimized according to your needs and expectations.

I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Britta

Interesting websites, forums and blogs

2008-02-06T04:41:00Z

I recently spent time looking for online resources that target linguists, localizers, terminologists and people generally interested in language-related matters. I was surprised to see how many great online language resources there are (both entertaining and informative). I had a good time reading and will definitely revisit them.

Here are some I especially liked:

http://www.lingforum.com/forum/ (Academic linguistics discussion forum)
www.proz.com (Web portal for language professionals)
http://webtools.uiuc.edu/blog/view?blogId=25 (Blog on sociolinguistic and political language issues)
http://languageandhumor.com/blog/ (Blog on language, linguistics, and humor)

http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/ (Translation blog)
http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/SearchByQueryLoad.do?method=load (Inter Active Terminology Europe, Search tool from European Union)
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/terminology/ab.jsp#a00 (IBM Glossary)
www.multilingual.com (Multilingual Computing homepage)

I am certain that there are many more I am not aware of. Please let me know which language-related websites, forums and blogs you recommend.

I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Britta

Microsoft to launch a web portal with a new glossary search tool this spring

2008-01-31T21:11:00Z

Many of you know that Microsoft makes available the product glossaries of the products we shipped on MSDN for download. We also have a spreadsheet with select core terminology available for download on http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx. For details, please see my posting from September 14, 2007.

We are aware that many of our customers would appreciate a more direct string and term search solution. To address this need and to better support localization communities in the markets we ship in, we decided to build a web portal that is accessible to our customers world-wide, the Microsoft Language Portal (with an expected launch date this spring). The Language Portal will be used to share news and information on our terminology and localization standards and strategies. The portal will also provide you with the opportunity to give feedback on our terminology, to discuss language related topics, and to search our terminology database (the site will offer term and string search for all our languages!). In addition, we will feature a “Term of the Month” section where our terminologists will discuss individual IT terms that are of interest to a larger audience. Feel free to submit IT terms you would like to see discussed using the “Comment”-functionality of this blog.

I will share more details about the Microsoft Language Portal as we are moving towards its launch date. As always: I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,
Britta

Terminological consistency and partial language attrition?

2008-01-31T00:52:00Z

I am wondering what effects our attempts to ensure terminological consistency will have on our languages going forward.

Consistent terminology is necessary for efficient localization in a world that values business expansion in a global market while operating in a cost-efficient manner. Consistent source terminology ensures consistent target terminology. The more formulaic and “controlled” the source text, the better the results of machine translation. Texts with consistent terminology, grammar and syntax are the cheapest to localize.

In areas with a naturally limited technical nomenclature such as IT terminology, terminology management that results in the elimination of inconsistent terms (e.g. terms that differ from a predefined standard term while denoting the same object) is advisable. It improves the usability of the localized product while reducing the localization cost.

I believe in Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis of linguistic relativism that postulates that differences in language are related to differences in cognition of the persons who use the language. Differences in vocabulary sizes of individual languages reflect on difference in the cognitive state of the language users.

It seems to be in the best interest of a global industry to keep limiting vocabularies. Will this eventually influence our cognitive abilities?

Most popular download formats

2007-12-14T01:08:00Z

I am investigating what file formats people generally prefer for glossary downloads, csv, Excel spreadsheets, html, others? CSV seems to be the most generic one (e.g. the solution that might work best for the majority of language professionals). Please let me know what format(s) you prefer. I am also interested whether you have any format preferences for downloadable files with continuous text.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Britta

What kind of terminology lookup formats do you prefer for your localization work?

2007-09-19T02:24:00Z

I would like to find out what kind of terminology/glossary lookup formats you prefer for your localization work. Do you look up core terms and translations, entire strings and translations, or both (core terms AND strings containing the term you are interested in)? If you use both, please let me know which one you consider generally more helpful, core term or string lookup.

I am also interested in finding out how often you look up source term to target translation and how often you look up target term to source translation. I assume that source to target might be more important but would like to verify this with you.

Thank you for your input - I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Britta