Working with glossaries

Glossaries

A glossary is a file in plain text (UTF-8 encoded) containing bilingual alignments to force some tranalations. When a glossary is specified and the text to translate contains one or more snippets of one or more words that are included in the first part of the glossary file the translation will be forced to the second part. Let's conside this example for a Spanish to English glossary:

Pedro Pedro

Juan Juan

Please notice that first snippet and 2nd snippet in each line are separated by a TAB character

What we are indicating with that glossary file is that any ocurrences of the words Pedro and Juan should be kept invariant during the translation instead of trying to translate by Peter and John.

Glossaries are typically used to force the translation in some way of proper names, people names, brands, etc. They are not a replacement of Translation Memories and applicability is limited in flexive languages.

Creating a Glossary

Linguist create glossary files. using a plain text editor, for instance Sublime Text or Notepad+.

Some important points to take into account:

• Use UTF-8 encoding ALWAYS, moreover when dealing with non-standard charsets
• Use a TAB character to separate the two snippets in each line