How do I identify a term—standardization

The final criterion in this blog series on how to identify terms is, in my mind, one of the most important ones—standardization. Standardized usage and spelling makes the life of the product user much easier, and it is fairly clear which key concepts need to be documented in a terminology database for that reason. But are they same for target terms? And if not, how would we know what must be standardized for, say, Japanese? We don’t, but that’s when we rely on process and tools.