Translation glossary guide: a route to consistency & client trust

Achieving a consistent brand voice is hard enough when you’re working in a single language. When you start translating your content, inconsistencies get multiplied.

The result of these inconsistencies is audience distrust. Your potential clients get confused by your messaging and decide to go elsewhere.

This is why creating glossaries for translators and managing glossary terms is an essential step when you start localizing your content.

But does glossary building sound like a pain in the neck? It would be without a translation management system. Luckily for you, Smartcat makes glossary creation and maintenance easy. With us, you'll be able to ensure a consistent brand voice wherever your company operates.

What is a glossary in translation?

A glossary, also known as a terminology base or termbase, is an organized collection of translations for specific terms. These might be names, technical words, industry-specific jargon, or just the set words that your enterprise prefers to use (or avoid).

In its simplest form, a traditional glossary is a two-column spreadsheet. But with a translation management system like Smartcat, you can create much more useful and powerful glossaries than that.

What are the benefits of using glossaries?

There are many benefits of using glossaries to help you translate text in your localization workflow:

• Improve the quality and consistency of your translations. Make sure only approved translations appear in your translation project. This will generate a stronger brand voice and better trust. In technical content, you'll avoid wrong and inconsistent translations that can confuse readers and lead to errors.

• Enjoy easier cooperation. Glossaries mean multiple people can work on the same project to speed things up without having to worry about inconsistent terminology.

• Save time and money. Glossaries are cheap to build and using them can save you multiple rounds of revision. When you integrate your glossaries with Smartcat, your translators can use them to quickly insert your preferred translations directly from the editor.

• Streamline your translation workflow. A centralized resource for approved terms gives you better efficiency and consistency, enhancing overall translation management and productivity.

Using the Smartcat glossary feature is a great way to streamline your translation process. It helps you ensure consistency in your content to strengthen customer trust.

• Improve your AI translations. Smartcat uses terms from your glossary to improve the accuracy of your automated translation results.

• Use multiple glossaries. Use different glossaries for different clients, departments or types of content. Use more than one glossary in a single project.

• Have translators suggest terms that you can approve and reject. Set up a process for your translators to make suggestions but with you having the final word.

• Add comments and context for each term. Help translators get their work right the first time by giving them additional information about terminology while they're translating.

• Specify terms to avoid. Make sure certain words never appear in your content.

• Import glossaries. If you've already created glossaries in Excel or another CAT tool, you can easily import them into Smartcat.

• Search for terms across all your glossaries. From the main glossary page, you can search all your glossaries for a term without clicking into each one individually.

Before you start building your glossary

Creating and managing a glossary involves three main steps: preparation, glossary creation and glossary maintenance.m some documentation or plan to create a new glossary from scratch, the steps are very similar.

While preparation work might feel like a go-slow, your glossary will be used for many years. It's best to ensure you get it right the first time because correcting errors later will involve more work as the number of languages and words multiply.

Start by identifying the purpose of your glossary and whether you want a single language pair or multiple languages. This will help you decide what types of words you want to include and whether you need multiple glossaries.

Perhaps your company sells a technical product. In that case, you may want to create a glossary for technical terms that translators may not know. Perhaps you also want a separate one for your brand preferences such as names and slogans.

Collect existing materials such as past glossaries and style guides. These may be monolingual documents that can be used as the basis for creating your standard translations.

If your company has translated texts in the past, maybe it already has some translated terms you can use as a starting point. Since you’re building foundations here, don’t forget to have a professional translator do a quality check on them!

Smartcat has a standard glossary template that you can edit. If you want to see what your finished glossary will look like, check out this glossary example.

Having a streamlined solution for glossaries is just one part of the equation. To make them truly effective, you also need to put some thought into how you’re going to use them.

Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get off to a strong start:

• Think about your target audience. Some jargon might be clear to you, but it might not make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with your industry.

• Add context to your entries. A word like tab can have different meanings. Add context to help translators choose the most appropriate translation.

• Add “no-go” terms and phrases. If there are certain terms or phrases that you never want to see in your content, add them to your glossary with a note that they mustn't be used. (In Smartcat, if a translator tries to use a banned term, they'll see a warning message.)

• Don’t try to cover everything. It’s important to have a comprehensive glossary, but you’re not creating a dictionary. Try to focus on the most important terms.

• Split different domains into different glossaries. If you’re translating both contracts and marketing collateral, you might want to have two separate glossaries. You don’t want to use words like notwithstanding in your Facebook copy!

• Have a process to keep your glossaries up to date. As your business grows and changes, your glossary will need to evolve with it. Make sure you have a process to add, remove, and update terms on a regular basis.

• Have additions approved by someone with domain expertise. Smartcat makes it easy for translators to suggest new terms, but it’s important to have someone with the right expertise approve them before they're rolled out to the rest of the team.

• Make sure everyone knows about your glossary. A glossary is only effective if your in-house team and freelancers know about it and use it. Promote it among your colleagues, and give training on how to use it effectively.

• Complement your glossary with a translation style guide. A style guide is another great way to ensure consistency in your translations. By combining it with a glossary, you can create an even more powerful tool for consistency across your content.

• Work with a language service provider to ensure your glossary is comprehensive and accurate. You can find freelancers in the Smartcat linguist marketplace.

• Combine your glossary with other resources. Get the most out of it by using it with other QA tools and processes.

Follow the simple steps listed below and you'll have your glossary ready in the blink of an eye.

1. Log in to your translation and localization workspace on Smartcat. Scroll down and click on “Linguistic assets” to manage your translation memories and glossaries. A new page will open.

2. In the dropdown menu at the top of the page, select “Glossaries”. Next, click on the purple button that says “Create Glossary”. A pop-up window will open.

3. In this window, add your glossary name and languages (as many as you want) and fill in any other relevant details. If you need help understanding the advanced options, see our page to help you understand glossary properties and structure. Click to save your new glossary.

4. Back on the main glossary page, click on your new glossary and start adding terms. You can do this one by one by extracting terms from the reference materials you gathered earlier. Alternatively, you can upload your existing glossaries. For detailed instructions on uploading glossaries, see this help page on importing and exporting glossaries in Smartcat.

Now, your glossary is ready to help you improve consistency in all your human and AI translations.

Once you’ve created your glossaries, you can find them in your dashboard and edit them whenever you want. You can set them up to automatically run with certain clients or projects, or add them to projects manually.

Your translators and reviewers will be able to see and use the glossary terms from inside the translation editor. 

When you run quality assurance, you can use your glossaries to automatically validate translations.

To make sure your glossaries stay relevant, it's a good idea to plan regular reviews. These updates may involve adding new terms or removing obsolete ones.

If you're looking for a glossary to help you talk the talk in the world of translation, check out the Smartcat translation industry glossary.

If you use Smartcat to create your glossary, you don't need a template. You can just set up your free Smartcat account and follow the instructions above to create your glossary. Smartcat will build it for you based on our template. Here is a glossary template that would work with Smartcat.

In Smartcat, a termbase and a glossary are the same thing. Traditionally, a glossary is any bilingual word list, while a termbase is a glossary used in a CAT tool.

Note that a termbase isn’t the same as a translation memory (TM). A TM is a disorganized database that lumps together all your translated content.

Your translators can use TMs to search for translations of a term. The problem is that it takes longer. Also, if previous translators were inconsistent in their choices, the current translator won’t know which option you prefer.

A basic glossary that's going to be used for translation should include the following essential components: source term (the original term in the source language) and target term (the approved translation of the source term in the target language).

To help your translators further, you can provide context and notes. These may include definitions, explanations, and additional information or comments such as cultural or linguistic nuances. Providing this information helps translators use the term correctly.

To measure the success of your glossary, consider the following metrics before and after introducing the glossary:

• Reviewer translation quality ratings.

• Time needed to complete translations.

• Cost savings.

• Stakeholder satisfaction with the glossary.

• Brand consistency across all languages

Glossaries can be used to store different kinds of terminology. Here are some examples of different kinds of glossaries.

• Industry glossaries contain terms that are specific to a certain industry or field. These terms may be difficult to understand for the individuals outside the field.

• Client glossaries contain words specific to a certain client or brand. These may include product or service names and definitions, forms of greeting and address, and words to avoid.

• Project glossaries are vocabulary from various models, reports, and any other parts of a software project. Each term is defined with its meaning specific to the project domain.