4.6.2. Paper and Highlighter

Paper and highlighter is the traditional and "foolproof" method of extracting terminology units from printed material. The advantage of this method over the computer-assisted ones is obvious: you can decide in each case which terms to retain as candidate terms and which to ignore. In addition, you acquire knowledge about the subject field, related concepts, and term usage while you are reading the text.

Sometimes low-tech is best. Before computers, terminologists simply made copies of the texts they wanted to scan for terms, then marked potential terms in a text, often with a highlighter. Then, they would go back over the terms highlighted to select the ones they wished to record in their terminology management system.

term extraction can still be performed using this method today, in the following situations:

• when the text is short and not part of a larger group of texts,
• when the terminologist does not have an electronic copy of the text to be scanned, or
• when terminologists just don't have access to computers or to term-extraction software.

Manual highlighting of terms can be a tedious task. Once a text has been scanned for terms and their contexts, selected results must be transcribed for entry into the terminology management system, a process that sometimes results in keying errors.