The status of a term is important information for termbase users who require the corporate terminology for their daily work. A term’s status indicates the priority with which it should be used, the significance of alternative terms in a term entry and whether terms should not be used in corporate communications for legal reasons (copyright or other regulations and guidelines like political correctness).
Defining the term status
A term can currently be assigned one of four statuses in Lexeri: preferred, accepted, prohibited or obsolete.
The term status can be changed in the term form during its creation or editing. Clicking on the Status field opens a drop-down menu to select one of the four available statuses. Now select the status you wish to assign to the term. Click on Save once you have finished editing the term categories.
The selected term status is accepted and shown in the term field at the top:
When creating the first term in a new term entry, you must select the status preferred.
This is because each term entry must provide termbase users with at least one correct and usable variant of a term in a given language.
The principle also applies to each first term that is created for a term entry in a new language. Other terms with different statuses can then be added to this term.
Usage examples for the term status
Legally regulated use of terms
A start-up produces natural smoothies and juice cures that are designed to deliver individual and targeted nutrients.
When preparing their marketing texts, copywriters must adhere to mandatory terms that are enshrined in marketing law. For instance, terms such as ‘performance-enhancing’ and ‘health-promoting’ may only be used if medical studies provide sufficient evidence that the substances are actually effective. Given that this does not apply to the natural foods’ segment, these two terms must be strictly avoided in PR texts and are therefore assigned the status prohibited.
Politically correct language
A large restaurant chain is keen to adopt a politically correct approach and therefore instructs its editing department to eliminate the term ‘faggots’ in all future menus and event brochures and replace it with ‘spicy meatballs’. The term ‘meatballs in gravy’ is also permitted. The term ‘faggots’ is therefore marked as prohibited in Lexeri, while ‘spicy meatballs’ is given the status preferred and ‘meatballs in gravy’ is designated as accepted.
Different spellings of terms
Companies can also avoid errors in their use of terminology by assigning statuses to alternative spellings, most commonly between British and American English (favour and favor) and variants with or without hyphens (nondisclosure/non-disclosure).