[Corpora-List] Q: Translators seeking ideas for terminology research

[Iddo Greental]

Dear Corpora readers,

Lend me your ears (eyes?) for a moment as I describe the little
problem that is bothering my small (but elite) translation team trying
to come up with a creative solution for terminology management and
research. Your learned advice would be most highly appreciated.

We are a small translation team doing diverse translation work for our
company, varying from technical reports to business presentations to
official letters. The target language is English.

As for the technical conditions, we work on a windows-based local area
network, sharing a file server and a mail server. Translators produce
MS Word documents and Powerpoint presentations mostly. Last time I
checked, there were about 7 gigabytes of such material stored.

We have considered Babylon and Trados products as long-term solutions
but regrettably, we have neither time nor money (nor management
backing...) for software acquisition or development at this time.

So, what can we do? For now, being but humble translators, we put up a
simple MS Access database where we manually jot down useful
terminology as we go along. But there are still those 7 GB, piles on
piles of former documents, where I am sure we could find real treasure
if only we could manipulate it somehow (search? Index? Build a
concordance?)

Hence, my question to you is twofold:
1. How can we collect and organize terminology (barring new software
acquisition)?
2. What can we do to mine into those 7 GB of unexploited previously
completed work?

Thank you all in advance, awaiting your ideas and suggestions,

I.G.