Sooner or later, we all have those “senior moments” when we cannot remember a fact or someone’s name. You might even blank on a word, temporarily forgetting what a certain object is. In severe cases of aging or dementia, this happens regularly, resulting in what linguists call “nominal aphasia.” These victims of language loss have problems recalling words or names. They may know what you do with the object – eat it, throw it, stroke it – but they can’t recall the name. When I watched videos of aphasic patients in graduate school, I remember the immense frustration of people who lost the ability to associate words with objects.

Today, when I study the authoring process for marketing websites or technical publications, I’m often struck by the flip side of aphasia – there are far too many words. This runaway word count is compounded by the proliferation of terms that refer to the very same object. Maybe the authors cannot remember what a given thing is called, but it’s far more likely that their creative juices are flowing so swiftly that they’re intentionally avoiding repeated use of the same term over and over again.

The question of correct and consistent terminology is one that should command the attention of a company across its product lines and within the industry where it operates. Simply stated, terminology management concerns the terms that represent the system of concepts of a particular company, industry, science, art, government, or even social entity like a family unit.

Yes, your family may have its own nomenclature for objects that you regularly use or events that you traditionally host. In our house, for example, we have an immersion “chai-ball” on a thin chain for making a cup of Irish Breakfast Tea from loose leaves. If the quizzical looks we get from our houseguests are any indication, this term is meaningless outside my immediate family. The English Project in the United Kingdom has described “kitchen table lingo,” and a variety of terms like “podger,” “blipper,” and “melly” to describe the TV remote. The problem for terminology is when people don’t use the same words or wander into a variety of terms for the same things.

How bad is this problem? We worked with one company that found 120 variations of a product name, and 102 instances of a single sentence describing usage instructions across the company’s line. Is the Model J30 Flux Capacitor the same thing as the J30 Fluxcapacitor, Flux-Capacitor J30, FluxJ30, or the Fluxmaster II?

This multiplication of terms can be expensive and confusing. The printed or PDF documentation refers to the same product using various terms. In turn, the online help uses some, but not all, of those expressions. Once the marketing team gets its hands on the product, it may decide on the most colorful of the names. If it’s a consumer product, the advertising group might focus on yet another name in its pitch. By the time the customer tries to install or use the product, the marketing collateral, advertising, owner’s manual, and user interface may employ a random cross-section of those 120 terms. A truck manufacturer’s service bulletin described how to replace a broken part with an item that had a different name in its parts catalogue, thus sending mechanics off on a hunt for a non-existent component. This may result in customer confusion, more support costs, or even product liability and legal compliance issues.

Yes, product liability and legal compliance. In some industries, medical devices among them, there are strict guidelines for how a product is described in its marketing collateral, documentation, package inserts, and other explanatory materials. Inconsistent use of terminology can result in a product failing to comply with federal regulations in the United States or European Union Directives in E.U. countries.

Interestingly, content and enterprise information management companies haven’t given much thought to consistent terminology, except in terms of discussing components of their software and service solutions. In a quick review of their websites, you’ll find that Vignette doesn’t even mention it. EMC-Documentum is happy to engage in a discussion of ontology, but not in the less obscure art of terminology management. A search for “terminology management” at XyEnterprise points you to a translation software vendor for its multilingual content management, but not for its own products. It seems that formal terminology management has not yet crossed the threshold of enterprise systems, despite the savings and efficiencies associated with consistent naming in widely distributed and re-purposed content.

That’s not to say that big companies don’t worry about terminology. IBM has long employed a terminologist who works with a variety of teams for consistent product representation. The terminologist on staff at medical device manufacturer Medtronic  gets involved at the earliest stages of a project, working with the development team to formalize the words used to describe the product they will build. And faced with a proliferation of terms due to mergers and acquisitions, companies like Cisco  are actively reviewing their own terminology management futures. Companies such as Oracle, PTC, and Nokia also employ full-time terminologists.

Let’s complicate matters a bit more. Take terminology management one step further, beyond the simple transformations of product documentation in a single market, to a product that is sold in 10 other countries that speak different languages. Those 120 terms that refer to a single product now have the potential of becoming 1,200 terms once translated into those 10 languages. And each one of those translated terms will trickle through the documentation, online help, marketing, advertising, and other collateral information in each of those languages. These downstream uses all lead to the possibility of far more interpretations as creative writers, translators, and transcreators elsewhere in the supply and demand chains for that product.

The bottom line is that formal terminology management benefits companies both within a country and across its global business units. Harvesting, normalizing, and integrating your company and industry terminology into authoring and translation systems will allow you to save money on re-purposed content and translation, improve quality, and increase efficiency. At the same time, more consistent terminology can help you improve safety, compliance, and customer service.

So, which products could help you get started with terminology management? Dozens of language service providers and software vendors offer applications and services to make managing terms easier. As for how to choose the solution that’s best for your company, that’s a topic for another article.

--Don DePalma is the founder and chief research officer of the business globalization research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory , and author of the premier book on business globalization “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”