checkTerm can enforce terminology in any text editor, simply via the clipboard. For MS Word it even comes with a special plugin. The check does not only encompass terms stored as forbidden terms in the termbase. With its morphological technology, checkTerm also identifies incorrect variants, forms, compositions etc. Kaleidoscope´s checkTerm is the perfect answer for all those of you, who want a term check which is reliable and high quality on the one side, but also simple to use and easy to implement on the other.
All other tools available on the market are either significantly more complex and are thus simply beyond the reach of most clients, in terms of costs, but also in terms of process maturity and IT administration. Or they are not sufficiently effective because they rely on a simple character-based comparison of content with the termbase, without linguistic or morphological features such as stemming or decomposition of complex multi-word terms. Klaus Fleischmann, Managing Director of Kaleidoscope, explains the advantage of this new kind of tool: “checkTerm offers the best of both worlds: It is a sophisticated linguistic term checker, yet it is easy to implement.”
Correct Source Content
checkTerm does not require you to create and maintain a new termbase. Rather, the clever terminology logic is based on SDL MultiTerm, the de facto industry standard for corporate terminology. You can keep using SDL MultiTerm or quickTerm, Kaleidoscope´s terminology workflow management system, to validate, store and maintain your terminology. checkTerm will retrieve the necessary information about allowed and forbidden terms directly from there. For instance, you can simply define to always use “smart dial”, while “quick dial” or “fast dial” are marked as forbidden.
The term check will reliably flag the use of these forbidden terms in any content. No matter if your colleague is writing a quote in MS Word, or technical documentation in a CMS, or simply an email: checkTerm always checks whether “smart dial” is used. You can even enforce this correct usage in ERP strings or software GUI labels. All content your company creates can be checked for terminological correctness.
Correct Translations
Of course, the termbase also contains information about allowed and forbidden terminology in all target languages. So, of course, you can also check terminological correctness in all your translations. Project managers or translators can run these checks directly in SDL Trados Studio, their work environment of choice. checkTerm will first identify all terms which occur in the source text. Then the clever software will check whether the preferred term is used in the translation, and in its preferred form. While the “normal” term check in SDL Trados Studio checks a translation segment by segment, checkTerm verifies the entire source document at once and produces a precise report that can be used by the translator or project manager to verify the file.
The Secret behind checkTerm
The reason why checkTerm is so reliable is because it is based on morphology. While classical statistical term checkers simply identify “similar” sequences of characters, checkTerm actually analyzes the text by stemming nouns and verbs, decomposing words with several components and checking the result against the termbase. This way the algorithm can correctly spot declined or conjugated words and individual parts of compositions. So for instance, checkTerm will find “dial” as the regular form of “dialing” or all composites containing “dial”. Other check algorithms would fail to detect these, because they can only check if a word used in a text uses similar characters to one in the termbase.
At the same time, a significant advantage of the morphological approach is reducing so-called “false positives”. The challenge with existing term checking tools often is that they identify many “similarities” which in fact turn out to be totally different or irrelevant terms. With its morphological engine, checkTerm actually “sees things clearly” and does not suggest pointless similarities between content and termbase. Bottom line: The morphological engine used by checkTerm not only detects more terms during the term check, it also reduces inefficiencies by detecting less “false positives”.
Scientific Basis
The new morphological analysis engine is based on a two-year research project in cooperation with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In this project, our development team combined open source algorithms for morphological text analysis with our existing terminology solutions MultiTerm and quickTerm. The result is a completely new kind of term check software, based on terminological and linguistic aspects.
Use Cases
checkTerm is available in different modules and flavors to cover divergent use cases:
As a desktop tool, it simply rests in the system tray and waits for the user to hit a customizable hot key within any application where text can be typed. So the user just has to mark the text and hit the hot key: checkTerm will check the content for terminology and clearly mark issues for the user. We also offer a plugin for MS Word, which allows us to not only highlight issues directly in MS Word, but even to immediately fix them. Both of these solutions can be used as completely stand-alone, single user applications, or in combination with the checkTerm server back end.
As an alternative, we also offer checkTerm as a browser-based solution: Simply copy and paste a text to the checkTerm online form, or upload a complete file. checkTerm will highlight terminology issues in the application window itself, or output a report for further investigation.
If you want to use checkTerm in a translation context, then you should look at our SDL Trados Studio plugin: It allows translators or project managers to work directly in their preferred environment.
Kaleidoscope´s quickTerm and checkTerm solutions thus cover the entire life cycle of terminology, from creating, validating and standardizing it all the way to enforcing it in the actual content. By offering both a browser-based environment and a desktop tool, all users
can choose the most efficient way to work in their specific content process. And the checking process feeds back to the terminology process at large by allowing users to immediately request new terms or browse the termbase for useful alternatives.
User Benefits
The benefits for you as a user are obvious: You can finally put all your valuable terminological resources to work and improve your content. That is why we have intentionally kept the technological threshold for users as low as possible: With the desktop application running in the background, they just highlight text and press a hot key. Or they copy and paste it into the browser based version, or even check directly in MS Word. This way, each user can access the functionality in a way that best fits his or her way of working. Ultimately, all source and translated texts will be checked to make sure the standardized terminology is adhered to. This ultimately guarantees consistent and “one voice” content envisaged by all departments, from marketing to legal. In addition, this consistent content delivers effective SEO, optimized communication, improved branding, but also avoids patent or product liability issues.
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