The growing and progressive globalisation of economies and markets is forcing companies in every country in the world to export their products and services. The resulting international competition means that advertising and technical communication for these same products and services has assumed the utmost importance in the pursuit of competitiveness.
Thus, the words to say it - that is, presentation brochures, users' manuals, sales presentations, etc. - are becoming an ever more integral part of these same products and services. Often, they even make up the main factors in differentiation.
Therefore, the quality assurance of the technolects, in one language after another, is becoming the prerequisite for the successful conquest of all markets. What is more, since marketing considerations are increasingly turning advertising and commercial translations into technical translations and vice versa, linguistic precision and stylistic appeal are inevitably beginning to converge.

For this reason, terminology information technology presents itself as the decisive and crucial tool for the production of this great profusion of new multilingual commercial literature which must by necessity be of excellent quality.
In keeping with the advent of new technologies which have made it possible to link terminology and information technology (the birth of terminology information technology), EUROLOGOS was one of the first companies to invest - first at its head office and then at its various international offices - in network platforms and various forms of terminology software. Over the years, the Trados system has taken preference over the others.

Practically a decade after the first terminology department was created, the principal problems we have encountered can be briefly described as follows.
First of all, the context for this development. In order to produce Total Quality in the field of language services, our Group has defined three guiding principles for its marketing strategy. Any self-respecting translation company - and we are convinced of this - owes it to itself to be Multilingual, Multinational, and Multimedial.
In order to cope with the ever increasing technicity of multilingual documents, the use of linguistic engineering to facilitate the translation process is the obvious choice. In fact, it is no longer possible to translate manuals, catalogues and other multilingual booklets to a degree of excellence without the systematic use of the appropriate and suitably stored terminology.
In close collaboration with our clients and after so many years, we now provide and develop the management of the technolects belonging to each company. Our translators can now draw upon our translation memory to thus guarantee the homogeneity of both the phraseology and the terminology of their texts, which is synonymous with increased quality and productivity.
However, we make no secret of the fact that setting up and managing a terminology department within a translation company is not always an easy undertaking.
 

• First of all, there is the problem of the considerable investment required in terminological equipment, terminology software and above all in personnel. This remains a sizeable obstacle which few companies can or dare to surmount. The activity of terminology sometimes requires years of devoted work before it becomes profitable. In fact, databases have to be fed constantly with validated terms before they can prove their efficiency. Moreover, they must be regularly "monitored" in order to avoid any problems of multiple occurrence, which constitutes the major risk once databases attain a certain size.
   

• So it is not unusual that many translators remain sceptical of the usefulness of terminological pursuits to the extent that even experienced terminologists have difficulty in getting recognition for the professional and economic grounds for their activity. In fact, translators complain that they do not find the right term at the right moment, or if the term exists, it does not appear in the desired languageÉ The pressures of profitability in translation often lead to fatally hasty discouragement.
   

• The last difficulty to be pointed out is that of the validation of glossaries. In order for it to be possible for the directory created by the terminologists to be used for the translation of documents provided by the client, it must be validated by the client's technicians. As we know, a concept (signified) must be designated by one and the same term (the signifier) throughout the entire document to be translated. It is up to the client to choose the "best" term or, at least, to participate in its final validation. Unfortunately, this operation is not always carried out by the client due to lack of time, professional culture and budgetary constraints.

In spite of these difficulties, at EUROLOGOS, we still persist in believing that terminology is well and truly the future of translation. In any case, the relative ignorance of this discipline means that even today, it is slow to be introduced in companies. In fact, with the exception of German companies in particular and certain large multinationals which have shrewdly picked up on the goodwill represented by multilingual technolects, very few companies are able to invest in this area, as their personnel is often resistant. It must be said, we have only just begun to labour for the introduction of new technologies into a profession which is so traditionally attached - and rightly so, by the way - to its paper and pens. The EAFT and its schools for translation have their work cut out for them.