In the translation industry, a glossary is basically a list of specific terminology that helps to ensure consistency in translation. Every language, every industry and even your very own company use specific expressions that need to be addressed and used properly in order to give your translated documents the right meaning. Additionally, glossary creation together with translation memory creation help you to significantly lower your future translation cost.

Why is a glossary such a big deal?

It's because working with glossaries in your organization creates unified expressions and ensures everyone understand each other. The same applies to translation: to assure we use your preferred terminology in documents we translate for you, it is important to have access to your glossaries. Especially in technical documents, ambiguous terms and use of inaccurate or different expressions for the same term creates confusion and can in the worst case lead to safety issues.

The reason of having a well-maintained glossary is to prevent such risks. And while some companies have developed internal glossaries, we know based on experience that many still lack them.

How to create a glossary in translation?

As proposals we can either help you to:

• Expand an existing glossary with more terms and more languages, or
• Build new glossaries from scratch based on your existing multilingual documents.

If source expressions do not exist, we usually begin by extracting typical terms and expressions from your existing source files. After this, the corresponding terms from matching target documents are added to create bilingual glossaries. This can be done for one language or many. It is possible to build glossaries from basically any kind of document type, including the PDF file format.

At idioma, we use an in-developed application, Term Grabber, to make this work straight-forward and highly efficient. And later in real translation projects, we then apply glossary checking to make sure your glossary terms have been correctly used.

To create a glossary or to update and maintain your existing one, feel free to contact our project managers.