What use is a glossary?
When you place an order with a translation company you will heard a lot of industry specific jargon that you may not understand. Your translation company may mention that they use a Term Base to help maintain a high quality across long term translation projects, and are especially useful in technical translation. Essentially, a ‘Term Base’ is what the industry names a glossary, and there are a number of benefits to using them in translation projects:
Clarifying Specialist Jargon
Depending on the industry of your business, you may have some specific and complicated terminology that is not easy to translate. A glossary, or Term Base, allows you to add any past translations you have of the terms, so that translators know how they should translate them throughout that project and across future projects. Translation Memories (TMs), which remember and suggest past translations, can be useful for this, but are not reliable enough to use on their own.
Maintaining Consistency
A glossary can help to ensure consistency across all your translation projects, allowing translators to see the particular or nuanced way you need a key term, such as a product name, type of technology or material, to be translated. Before starting a translation, we will extract commonly used terms across your websites and literature, getting to the core of what it means for your business, researching it as necessary to try to get the most accurate result possible. It is also possible to save notes, images and URLs into Term Bases for translators to refer to throughout the project.
Client Involvement
Term bases are kept online, which means they are easily shared online between our project managers, clients and translators. This means that clients are able to monitor any updates as they are made, and can comment on and become involved with the translation of terminology throughout the project. We begin to develop the Term Base during the knowledge transfer sessions, where we work hard to understand our clients and their needs and aims, and will take any client suggestions into account, seeking their approval, before we make anything definite.
Term bases can be multi lingual, which means clients can rest assured that the same level of accuracy and consistency will be present across all your target languages. Effectively translating your core messages is a vital part of your international success and, though it may seem like an added stress, working with your translation company to create a solid term base is a wise investment of your time.