For manufacturers selling products across multiple markets, terminology should be established before the manual is written. This is especially important for industrial equipment, construction machinery, material handling equipment, and medical devices, where users need to identify functions, components, controls, and safety information correctly.
When a new product is ready for documentation, what should come first?
Many teams begin with the table of contents, procedures, screenshots, and safety information. But for a product with multiple functions, components, controls, and UI elements, there is an earlier step: deciding what those things will be called throughout the documentation.
A manual explains how users accomplish specific tasks with a product. To follow an instruction, the user first needs to know exactly what the instruction refers to. Product names, component names, feature names, control labels, and UI terms identify what the user needs to operate, check, install, or maintain.
For that reason, terminology should be established before large-scale manual authoring begins.
For products developed for multiple markets, this becomes even more important. The terminology established in the first manual often carries forward into product variants, operator manuals, installation instructions, service documentation, and localized versions.
One Component Should Not Have Three Names
The most immediate purpose of terminology standardization is simple: users should not have to determine whether two different terms refer to the same thing.
If a feature introduced in one section appears under a different name later in an operating procedure, the user has to stop and interpret whether it is the same feature or something different.
This problem is easy to create in manufacturing organizations because terminology often comes from different sources.
Engineering may use one name in a drawing or BOM. The software team may use another term in the UI. Field service may use a shorter name. Marketing may use a more customer-friendly expression. An older manual may contain terminology inherited from a previous model.
For a midsize manufacturer with a lean documentation team, there may be no dedicated terminology manager to resolve these differences. The technical writer or documentation partner often receives all of these source materials at once and has to determine which term should become the standard.
That decision should be made before inconsistent terms spread throughout the manual.
For industrial equipment and medical devices, where operating procedures and safety information matter, inconsistent naming is more than a writing-style issue. Users need to recognize the same function, component, device, or action as the same concept wherever it appears.
Small Inconsistencies Grow with the Product Line
Terminology problems rarely remain inside one document.
A successful product gains new configurations, options, and follow-on models. New manuals are often developed from existing documentation rather than written completely from scratch. If the product is sold globally, those manuals are also translated into additional languages.
Suppose the source manual uses two or three names for the same function. A translator may reasonably assume that those terms represent different concepts. Once different translations are created in multiple languages, identifying the approved term later becomes much more difficult.
The pattern is straightforward:
Inconsistent source terminology → inconsistent derivative manuals → inconsistent translations
This is why terminology becomes more expensive to fix as the number of products and languages grows.
For manufacturers that expect to expand a product line, it is usually more efficient to establish terminology while developing the first manual than to clean it up after several models and localized manuals already exist.
Build the Terminology Base Before Writing
Before drafting hundreds of pages, the technical writer should identify the terms that will appear repeatedly and establish the preferred terminology.
Not every word needs to be managed. The priority is terminology that affects product identification, user actions, safety, or consistency, including:
- product and component names
- feature and system names
- controls and operating actions
- UI menus, buttons, and status messages
- alarms and error terminology
- safety-related terms
- terms defined by applicable standards or regulations
Existing inconsistencies should receive particular attention. If the same component already appears under several names in engineering documents, UI strings, service materials, or previous manuals, the documentation team should resolve the preferred term before authoring continues.
The resulting terminology should not remain in a spreadsheet that no one uses. It should become a shared reference for technical writing, document review, derivative manual development, translation, and QA.
For many documentation teams, a sophisticated terminology management system is not necessary at the beginning. A well-structured spreadsheet can be enough if it clearly identifies the approved term and the rules for using it.
The Questions Begin Once You Build the Glossary
Understanding the need for terminology consistency is easy. Applying it is harder.
Documentation teams quickly encounter questions such as:
- Which terms actually need to be controlled?
- Should every frequently used word be added?
- If several terms mean the same thing, which one should be preferred?
- What happens when the engineering term, UI label, product label, and field-service term are different?
- Should deprecated or prohibited terms also be recorded?
- Who approves a new term when a feature or component is added?
- When should multilingual terminology be established for localization?
At this point, terminology management becomes more than collecting words. The team needs a practical method for selecting, approving, recording, and maintaining terms.
A Practical Way to Start Terminology Management
1. Identify the terms that need control
Start with recurring product terms, known inconsistencies, safety terminology, and terms defined by standards or regulations.
2. Decide which term should be preferred
Do not rely on frequency alone. Compare the terminology used in the product itself, the UI, engineering materials, applicable standards, and established industry usage. User comprehension should also be considered.
3. Record the decision
For each controlled term, record the preferred term along with useful information such as its definition, terms that should not be used, and the source or basis for the decision.
Excel or another simple shared format can be sufficient at this stage.
4. Use it throughout manual development
Technical writers and reviewers should use the terminology as an authoring standard. When localization begins, approved target-language terms can be added and connected to the CAT tool termbase.
5. Maintain it as the product changes
Products do not remain static. New functions, components, and models introduce new terminology. The documentation process should therefore define who can approve new terms and when existing terms should be changed or retired.
The Hard Part Is Not Building the Glossary
A good terminology program is not measured by how many words are stored in a glossary.
If too many ordinary words are added, writers and reviewers may stop using the glossary effectively. The more important question is which terms need control and which can be left alone.
The team also needs a clear way to resolve conflicting sources. A term required by a standard may differ from the label on the product. Engineering terminology may differ from established industry usage. The UI may already contain a term that cannot easily be changed.
These are decisions that require technical documentation judgment.
Terminology management is therefore not simply the creation of a glossary file. It is the process of identifying the concepts users repeatedly encounter, assigning consistent names to them, and maintaining those decisions across manuals, product variants, and languages.
That is why terminology belongs near the beginning of user manual development—not at the end of the editing process.
For more detailed guidance, see Hansem Global’s Terminology Management for Equipment Manuals: A Practical Guide. It covers how to select terminology for control, determine preferred terms, document rejected terms, resolve conflicting sources, and prepare terminology for multilingual documentation.
If you need technical documentation development and localization with terminology standardization built into the process, contact Hansem Global.