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?

My apologies for being late in answering your question!

Typically a term in a glossary or termbase corresponds to a single word or a compound word such as "fire brigade". The equivalent terms in different languages are understood as being equivalent to each other as they represent the same concept. If you have got a phrase - a sample sentence or an idiom - I think it would be wrong to put it in a descriptive field of its base term (and it could be more than one such sentence per base term) because it would be difficult to give its equivalents in other languages which would not be translations of the base term, in an unequivocal way.

But if you enter your phrase as a separate concept/conceptGrp, you will lose its connection to the base term and if the base term has several conceptGrps with different subjects, it would be difficult to define the proper link target for a cross-reference.

Imagine you want to note that German: "das kommt mir spanisch vor" would be equivalent to English: "there's something fishy [going on] here". How would you note this in Multiterm 2021?

My apologies for being late in answering your question!

Typically a term in a glossary or termbase corresponds to a single word or a compound word such as "fire brigade". The equivalent terms in different languages are understood as being equivalent to each other as they represent the same concept. If you have got a phrase - a sample sentence or an idiom - I think it would be wrong to put it in a descriptive field of its base term (and it could be more than one such sentence per base term) because it would be difficult to give its equivalents in other languages which would not be translations of the base term, in an unequivocal way.

But if you enter your phrase as a separate concept/conceptGrp, you will lose its connection to the base term and if the base term has several conceptGrps with different subjects, it would be difficult to define the proper link target for a cross-reference.

Imagine you want to note that German: "das kommt mir spanisch vor" would be equivalent to English: "there's something fishy [going on] here". How would you note this in Multiterm 2021?

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