Consistency is an important measure of quality in translation. Three tools that help maintain consistency in a company’s translation include glossaries, style guides, and translation memory. Glossaries help maintain consistency at the term level, translation memories help maintain consistency at the sentence level, and style guides help fill in the gaps by maintaining consistency in style, tone, phrasing, and more. This week’s tip focuses on glossaries and terminology lists: what they are and why you need them.

Glossaries can be as simple as terminology lists that include only a list of terms with their translated equivalents. Or they can be more complex and include additional definitions, descriptions, usage examples, synonyms, and more. In any case, the basic goal of a glossary is to make sure that terminology is used consistently from the beginning instead of requiring increased time and costs of 10%-50% to recheck and redo inconsistent terminology. Terminology may differ from one company to another, even within the same industry, for various reasons. In any case, consistent terminology will help to avoid confusion and will improve both quality and readability.

Getting Started with Glossaries

To begin maintaining a translation glossary for your organization, here are a few tips to get started:

• Manage the glossary centrally. The glossary will be most useful and remain up to date if everyone has easy access to the current version.
• Involve anyone in your company who takes responsibility for reviewing completed translations. Those reviewers need to be on the same page from the start, or you’ll waste time reworking both the glossaries and translations.
• Create a culture that adds to the glossary whenever there is a chance to avoid ambiguity. Instruct writers, translators, editors, and anyone in charge of creating the glossary to add a word to the glossary any time there is there is more than one good option for a translated term. Any time a decision needs to be made by a writer, translator, or editor between two or more good terms, that decision should be made based on the glossary.
• Start simple with any existing terminology lists at your company. Does the company already have a monolingual glossary? How about a list of product names? Or list of terms that you do not want to be translated?
• Search for help from your industry. Does your industry already have a monolingual glossary that you can use to start? Or, better yet, are there already existing translation glossaries in your industry? For example, in the software industry, you can access and download localization glossaries from Microsoft and Apple online.
  • Search Microsoft’s terminology and glossaries in 70 languages on the Microsoft Language Portal: http://www.microsoft.com/language
  • Download Microsoft Translation Glossaries in 35 languages, full international product glossaries in CSV format (MSDN or TechNet subscription required): http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx
    Update September 2010: Microsoft now has 2 more options to download terminology (http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Terminology.aspx) and UI translations (http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Translations.aspx)
  • Download Apple localization glossaries in 17 languages: http://developer.apple.com/internationalization/download/
  • Download Apple International Glossaries from 1997 for MacOS in 34 languages: ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Localization_Tools/Apple_Intl_Glossaries/

  Other tech companies also make their glossaries publicly available:

  • Download Mozilla Translation Glossaries in 18 languages in text format: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_glossary.html
  • Download Second Life Glossaries in a few languages: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linguistic_QA_with_the_Second_Life_Viewer
• Just do it. The last and most important tip is to just do it. Even if your glossaries start out with only 2 or 3 terms, you should start them today just to avoid that typical paralysis that could keep you from ever building and maintaining them at all. Most glossaries are grown slowly, and they need to start with something, even if that something is little.

For more help developing glossaries for translation and localization, make quick and easy contact with GGI.