In My Own Terms is a terminology blog written by Patricia Brenes, a translator and ECQA-certified Terminology Manager who holds a master's in specialized terminology from the University of Vic in Barcelona and works in the quality control unit of a translation department at an international organization. It publishes under the motto "Terminology for Beginners and Beyond," covering the concepts, standards, and working methods of terminology management for an audience that mostly arrives without formal training in the field.
The blog began in 2016 as Brenes's final project for her ECQA Terminology Manager certification and outgrew that brief. Brenes had noticed that people curious about a young and thinly documented discipline had nowhere accessible to learn: the reference literature is expensive, hard to obtain, and written for specialists. In My Own Terms answered that by explaining the field in plain terms and gathering the scattered resources into one place. It has since accumulated infographics on the history of terminology, a "Who is Who in Terminology" biography section, and a standing page on terminology project management. It placed fifth twice in the Professional Language Blogs category of bab.la's annual language lovers contest, a ranking that screens roughly a thousand language blogs down to a shortlist of twenty-five.
"Terminology books are expensive and hard to get, and even if you could afford them, they tend to be a little too technical. That is why I called it In My Own Terms, to explain concepts, well, in my own terms, and make terminology as a career more accessible to potential terminologists and terminology teaching a little bit more fun. This is a perfect site for newbies, but also for those who already know about terminology and want to comment and provide resources. So In My Own Terms is for 'beginners and beyond'." ~ Patricia Brenes
I found this blog through a post titled "Is this a glossary, a lexicon, or a thesaurus? How to tell them apart," which I hit while researching internal organizational structures for 📝Mythos One. That distinction ended up shaping how I think about the 📝Glossary of Glossaries.