A glossary is an alphabetical list of terms in a specific knowledge field, with their definitions.
This is what you see at the end of a book, including new, uncommon, or specialized terms.
A glossary in the translation context however is a bit different, it is not about clarifying uncommon terms for the public; it is an internal list for translators working on the same translation project.
A glossary would serve as a language translator to ensure the consistency of the document through unifying certain terms throughout the whole document. It is very important to help translators know how to translate certain words; it is more significant though in case more than one translator work on the same document simultaneously.
A glossary shared among translators at the same company would perfectly serve for that. It will as well decrease the time consumed by human translators and the overall cost of translation.
It contains every term that is particular to a specific field or industry and needs a specific definition.
Nevertheless, a glossary should be short, as if it is very long; it will be difficult to navigate and will rather prolong the translation process.
Simple and Efficient Glossary
It can be just a glossary for translation from one language to another, or for more than two languages, it can also be either simple or sophisticated.
Contrary to online translation, a human translator usually provides accuracy and consistency; a glossary is one tool behind this precision of language translator.
In many cases, language translators would be confused about how to translate certain words or terms where there are synonymous words conveying the same meaning.
Here comes the glossary, it helps to choose just one word and stick to it until the end of the document, to deliver correct and consistent translation.
Once you set a glossary for a certain field, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel again for another file related to the same business or industry.
Glossaries also contain not to be translated terms (NTBT) list; this includes names of products for example that will be kept in the source language as they are.
There are some software solutions that make using glossaries even simpler, easy, and user-friendly.
This combines human translators who know how to translate with software; getting benefits of both and resulting in accurate and precise translation with less time and effort.
It helps to create multilingual glossaries, searching multiple glossaries, importing glossaries from different file types, and recording history search, among other technical advantages.
