How will you enter a sample phrase or an idiom in Multiterm termbase?

Question

Typically, you have a term, i.e a word or a multi-word unit such as "fire brigade" which has its equivalents in other language.

What if you want to give a sample sentence (plus its equivalents) in that entry - let's say to demonstrate differences in the syntactic means of different languages? Do you use descriptive fields such as "sample" in each language? That could be quite difficult to understand though, if you need to display several sample sentences?

And how would you deal with an idiom where the term is the principal component?

Paul · Answer

Wolfgang Schindler 
 I ignored this post because I assumed you wanted advice on the approach to take from other users rather than how to technically do it. But it seems to be a little light on replies so perhaps you can clarify what sort of help you are looking for?

Paul · Answer

Wolfgang Schindler 
 Well... think about how you would do this theoretically as a terminological entry. What is the term in your entry? If it's "spanisch" then clearly it could be used in several ways when speaking in German. It's a similar problem when using more basic examples such as "bank". Is this something you put your money in, a place to store data or the sides of a river? 
 Handling homonyms is tricky and the normal practice would be to create separate entries for each one. In this way your description would be unique to each entry and you would not have different descriptions against a single entry. 
 Having said this, normally when creating a termbase the advice is to avoid homonyms, but it's not always possible. Some languages, like Arabic, can be very complicated in this regard... in fact I believe there may be at least two schools of thought ranging from there being many homonyms in the language to there being none at all... probably another discussion altogether! 
 Essentially, I think your solution should be separate entries for each homonym so you don't have multiple descriptions for a single entry. Might be ok in a dictionary, but not when working with terminology in the way we do. 
 and Christine Bruckner had a similar discussion over here so might be interested in your thoughts too: 
 https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/multiterm/25588/using-multiterm-with-a-concept-oriented-approach-and-the-option-check-for-possible-non-use-of-target-terms-produces-lots-of-false-positives---what-are-we-supposed-to-do

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How will you enter a sample phrase or an idiom in Multiterm termbase?