Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Terminology

I'm in a no win situation. I sit betwixt the 'Business' and IT and I'm expected to have an understanding of the language used by all sorts of groups within these various organisations.

I sometimes forget that I'm the conduit for information transfer. And it occurred to me today I use phrases from one side of the organisation without thinking too much about whether my audience knows what 'full image bleed' or 'EPMO' means.

To the uninitiated 'full image bleed' could be quite gory. I also wonder whether I invent phrases or terms just because it's easier for me to understand.

Perhaps someone should invent a Babelfish assistant. I envisage a device that might sit on a desk in front of a presenter and it provides a simple, easy to understand translation of business or technical phrases that aren't in every day use. Or maybe we need the true Babelfish from Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy that sits in the ear of the listener.

3 comments:

Rana said...

I'm in a should-win situation. I sit betwixt the "Business" and IT. It's the best place to be.

It is not is not all about translating between languages. It is often a case of translating words to pictures, or sometimes vice versa. It isn't that easy to take a lengthy babble of gobbledygook about effervescence and convergence and continuity and momentum and rotation and velocity and then say "what you really mean is a vortex" :)

Anonymous said...

I have to say, today's been quite mental. We've discovered more about "Regions" that ENGInE will use and named them. The weird thing is that - it seems - ENGInE's underlying software doesn't have templates for pages. Well, it does, but it doesn't...

We've also had a TLA-fest. Prepare to be bamboozled by the MDP, MDC and BFT amongst others (for the terminally curious, I'm referring to the Media Display Panel, Media Display Controller and Big Framework Title respectively). These are just some of the modules that can be used to build a page, and we're wrestling with which "Regions" you can use them in and which you can't. I have to say - my head hurts a little bit.

Happily for consumers these will only appear in the authoring environment for ENGInE and refer to the different components you can put on a page.

Happily for authors both the code-name and full name will appear in the system. Past experience has shown that this is one of those situations where it actually helps to have a TLA and a name as the TLA's tend to work better internationally.

Anyhow - onwards to the completion of the "Module Definition"

acardus1 said...

I think this illustrates my point...
:)