From kaizen to continual improvement: On the adoption of terms from the japanese car industry and the fixation of Catalan denominative proposals

Abstract

The innovations contributed by Toyota Motor Company to the car industry involved a set of techniques and practices that are still used to manage production processes today, especially on the production line. Since these techniques were originally from Japan, the names they received came from the Japanese (andon, jidoka, kaizen, poka-yoke…), a language in which they were mostly common words. The aim of this paper is to answer the question as to whether it is better to keep these concepts in their original language, to look for Catalan designations, or to combine both solutions depending on the case. To do that, we describe the principles and criteria applied by the TERMCAT Supervising Council to fix the denominative proposals for a set of terms related to Toyota’s production system that belong to the supply chain domain.