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tranfree issue 21 - 20th November 2000
Glossary Compilationby Apollo To the translator, glossaries can be a powerful tool. With systems such as TRADOS where you can actually link glossaries with your translations, they soon become invaluable. So in this short report I'd like to take a brief look at glossaries and how to use them. When compiling glossaries, I like to work through the translation as usual, adding terms to my glossary as I go. It's useful that in Word you can have more than one file open at a time. This lets you keep an eye on the consistency of your translation at the same time. If the glossary is getting quite large, you can use the Sort function to put all the entries into alphabetical order. The huge advantage of this system is that it ensures consistency. You can make changes with ease if you decide you want to translate terms in a different way. Another way of compiling glossaries is to read through the entire text for translation first. You then pick out the terms you want to add to your glossary, checking on their meanings and listing them all. This gives you a great overview of the text you will be translating, which should help you when it comes to choosing terminology. And again, if you then discover you chose the wrong word initially, a quick Global Search and Replace will put it right. Compiling glossaries is a great help in a number of cases...
Clients will occasionally approach you to compile a glossary for a job and ask you to submit the glossary to them for... Say to them "fine, you can have my glossary, that'll be XX pounds (or dollars, or francs) per term". This is fine in theory, but you'll then find some clients won't pay for a glossary. What then? You have a choice. You can compile and submit the glossary and run the risk of the client taking it and using another translator. Or you don't get the work. The choice is yours. Except there *is* another choice. If you know the client well and have a good relationship with them, they won't be looking to replace you with another translator. It's quite possible that their client has asked them to submit a glossary for approval purposes. It's much quicker for a client to look at a list of terms and confirm translations than to work through an entire document. In this case, you stand to benefit greatly from client feedback. It's very difficult to get feedback from clients, but they don't mind looking through glossaries. And because you'll keep the final glossary, you'll get the repeat work. There is, of course, always a risk that the client will send the glossary to someone else and use them instead. In this case, I suggest offering this service only to trusted clients with whom you have a good working relationship. You get on with these clients, and they like working with you. My absolute favourite thing about glossaries is that you always have them to refer to. So ten years on, that glossary you compiled on mountain climbing or pig farming might save you hours of research... And if you then go on to compile one huge glossary of all the terms you've ever collated, you'll be amazed at just how much research you've done! And Knowledge is, after all, Power. Anonymously contributed by Apollo - one of our forum moderators Come and talk to Apollo at the...
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...approval.
This is a source of many a problem. Will the client give the
glossary to another translator later on? Well, the simple answer
to that is to charge for it!