The database nobody reads
A term base built in a spreadsheet and saved to a shared drive is not a resource. It is a record of good intentions.
A term base only works if it is in the translator's tool at the moment of writing, not in a document somebody must remember to open.
Where the terms have to live
Every organisation that commissions regular translation eventually produces the same artifact: a glossary document, painstakingly assembled, listing the approved term in the source language alongside its verified equivalent in the target. It may run to hundreds of entries. It is almost certainly wrong in several places, partially out of date, and almost never consulted at the moment it matters most — when a translator's hands are on the keyboard.
The failure is not laziness. A translator mid-sentence is not going to pause, switch applications, search a document, confirm the result, and switch back. Cognitive load at that moment is already high, and the friction of a separate file makes the lookup feel optional. The translator uses their best judgment instead, which is usually good, and occasionally produces the one variant the legal team specifically decided to retire two years ago.
Terminology work is deciding that within this document set a thing has exactly one designation, and enforcing it. One object, one name
A term base — a structured, searchable database of approved terminology — solves this only when it lives inside the translation environment itself. Computer-assisted translation tools, commonly called CAT tools, surface matching entries automatically as the translator reaches each relevant segment. The term appears in a panel beside the working text. The choice is visible, not recalled from memory. Consistency follows not from discipline but from design.
This is why the International Organization for Standardization, in ISO 17100, treats the management of project-specific terminology as part of the pre-production process, not an optional extra. Terminology has to be prepared and made available before translation begins, in a form the tools can read.
The exchange format that makes this portable is TBX — TermBase eXchange — an ISO standard that allows a term base built in one system to be exported, transferred and imported into another without data loss. Without it, approved terminology stays locked in whichever proprietary format the client's preferred tool happens to use, and disappears the moment the project changes hands.
The discipline has a founding figure and a doctoral thesis behind it, and the fact that it began with electrical engineering is not an accident. Wüster in Vienna
Eugen Wüster, who formalised terminology as a discipline in Vienna in the mid-twentieth century, was concerned with exactly this kind of problem: not collecting words, but ensuring that within a given domain, one concept had one name, reliably, across all who used it. The database is the mechanism. The mechanism only functions at the point of use.
An organisation that wants consistent translation across ten vendors, three languages and five years has one realistic option: maintain a term base in a format every vendor's tool can ingest, keep it current, and make its import a contractual requirement. The alternative is a well-intentioned document that nobody reads.