There is no doubt about the increasing importance of terminology in our society today. Terminology plays an important role in many different fields such as standardization, translation, technical documentation, and software localization.
It would suffice to have a look at any subject field to discover the increasing need for specialised vocabularies (terminologies) because, for example, of the growing specialisation and increasing innovation in all fields. It is often the case that new terminology does not exist in the target language or culture and translators must create it. Or that translations are to be done from one source language into many target languages, which implies solving terminology problems in the source language in order to create multilingual terminologies. Finally, terminology is essential when several translator teams all over the world work in the same translation/localisation project and quality is a sine qua non.
Though little information is available regarding the return on investment (ROI) of terminology management, it is a fact that accurate and complete terminology improves the productivity of translators, technical writers and, in consequence, the productivity of companies as well. This was for example evidence of a study conducted at J.D. Edwards in 1998:
"The results of this study indicate that in the J.D. Edwards environment, changing an unmanaged term in the translation memory for software and documentation cost approximately USD 2000 in just one language" (Martin and Karsch 2001: 19).