Terminology tools

Terminology work plays a key role both in monolingual knowledge management processes, and in multilingual document management and translation work. In this chapter, we will focus on the methods and techniques available to select, handle and manage terminological units in specialized texts. The information available in specialist documentation is constantly evolving. A specialized knowledge concept cannot be described in isolation, but is part of a dynamic process. Contextual and situational information is necessary in knowledge representation. Automatically, one is directed to corpus-based research when discussing and analysing concepts in a specialized domain. Management of terminology (as an element of knowledge management) is part of the terminology work, which deals with the capturing, processing, updating and preparation of terminological data. The question we like to address in this paper is: which tools are available to support this type of terminology management?The software solution can be a very limited one, focusing on the input of data in a limited data base structure, or it can be a very extensive suit with many tools to accompany the terminology management process: input/handling/collecting/storing/retrieving.For this chapter, five terminology tools representative of the currently available tools have been selected and will be examined and compared in the next section. The selection was made based upon the diversity of the tools: SDL MultiTerm: the market leader, memoQ: voted the best TMS tool, Wordbee: the new trend of tools in the cloud, i-Term: the ISO-standard and finally TermTreffer: the exception, made-to measure. A detailed analysis using a large number of parameters will be given.