Language is structural. What a thing is called determines where it goes in a menu, how it is described in a support call and whether anyone can find it. We treat naming, navigation and copy as one problem rather than three, and we do it early, because renaming after launch is expensive in ways that do not appear on any budget line.

The work runs from short to long: product and feature names, interface strings, error messages that say what to do next, and then the longer material, technical documentation, datasheets, guidelines, reports. In practice these are the same discipline. A datasheet and an error message both fail for the same reason, which is that they were written by someone who already knew the answer.

We edit against a glossary the client keeps, not one we keep. If the terms only exist in our files, the consistency lasts until our invoice clears.