Last week we spoke about the importance of managing terminology on a company-wide level. Once this challenge is accepted, an organization or team needs to establish some terminology management metrics.
To measure this type of job, there’s a common approach. It states that terminology management jobs are paid per time spent.
In some organizations, debates about whether or not this is a term that should be added to the company glossary can take hours. Add the discussion around its translation into a couple of languages to the equation and the decision-making process can eat up the whole business day.
But not every company or terminology management team has the luxury of spending so much time on terminology, especially language service providers (LSPs). That is why there exist productivity norms to define the time spent:
seconds for term mining
Five seconds is the time needed during the initial gathering phase to decide whether or not a candidate is a term.
to 60 terms per hour
50 to 60 terms are what can be translated per hour per language. That means, it takes roughly 60 seconds per term per language.
Based on these metrics, an LSP can calculate the general hourly productivity of a terminology team and charge their clients accordingly, as well as help them estimate a terminology management project budget.
Having similar numbers at hand, companies that develop and sell technology solutions such as terminology management tools, can also “sell” the idea of saving on terminology control. More than 20 such technologies are featured at Nimdzi’s interactive comparison.
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