Terminographien

Terminographien, or terminographies, denote the body of work, products, and documentation produced by the field of terminography. The term encompasses the systematic collection, description, and organization of terms within a domain, together with the metadata and notes that accompany them. Terminography aims to ensure terminological consistency and facilitate clear communication among professionals, translators, educators, and software systems. Core outputs include termbases, multilingual glossaries, and terminological dictionaries, often stored in machine-readable formats and exchange standards such as TBX. These resources link terms to definitions, usage notes, domain concepts, language variants, synonyms, and preferred terms, enabling cross-language navigation and re-use in documentation and translation workflows.

Terminographien rely on methodological steps: domain scoping, term extraction and validation, definition drafting, sense disambiguation, and quality control by domain experts. They also involve organizing terms within a conceptual structure, typically a thesaurus or an ontology, to model relationships such as equivalence, hierarchy, and related terms. The work draws on linguistics, information science, and knowledge management, and interacts with standards such as ISO 704 (terminology work) and ISO 12620 (terminology management), as well as TBX for data exchange.

Applications span technical writing, localization, software localization, scientific publishing, and AI-assisted natural language understanding. Terminographien face challenges in multilingual alignment, polysemy, domain drift, and maintaining up-to-date terminology across fast-changing fields. They rely on collaboration among terminologists, domain experts, translators, and IT professionals to produce reliable, reusable term resources.