What is a glossary?
A glossary is an alphabetical list of the terms used in a field or a set of documents, each with a short definition or, in a bilingual glossary, its equivalent in the other language. Books have glossaries at the back; companies keep them to make sure everyone names things the same way. An index only points to the pages where a term appears; a glossary says what it means.
For translation, a bilingual glossary is a list of term pairs: the English term your firm uses, and the French term it has approved for it. Slab edge, rive de la dalle. Fire damper, registre coupe-feu.
Glossary, lexicon, term base
The three words overlap, and people use them loosely. In practice:
- A glossary is a list, often a spreadsheet or a document: term, equivalent, sometimes a definition.
- A lexicon is usually the vocabulary of a whole field or language, broader than any one company’s list.
- A term base is a structured database, one entry per concept, with the approved term in each language, its context, notes, forbidden alternatives and the date it was approved. Translation tools read it directly and flag the approved term as the translator works.
A glossary is where most companies start. A term base is what a glossary becomes once it is managed.
What a good entry holds
Use plain language, one concept per entry, and a definition that doesn’t lean on the term it defines. Here is an entry written for this page:
| English | French | Definition | Context | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| catch basin | bouche d’égout | Inlet that takes surface water into a storm sewer | NMS 33 05 16; puisard is a sump | Approved |
How to build one
- Pick the terms that cause trouble, starting with those your engineers keep correcting.
- Give each concept its own entry.
- Have someone who knows the work approve each one.
Software can pull candidate terms from your documents. On English text, NEOLO, Technitrad’s platform, scores 67.3 F1 on the ACTER term-extraction benchmark, against 61.2 for the best published result. A person still approves each entry.
How a translator uses your glossary
A translator who receives your glossary loads it into the translation tool. Each time a term from the list appears in your document, the tool shows the approved equivalent, and quality checks flag any segment where it was not used. The translator still writes the sentence; the glossary decides the words that matter.
Without one, even a specialist has to pick among several correct terms, and the next translator may pick differently. Your engineers then correct the same terms they corrected last time. With one, the drawings, the specification and the report agree.
What it does for your company
- Consistency across documents, translators and years.
- Fewer repeated corrections, because a term your engineers approved doesn’t come back wrong on the next job.
Only about 4 to 6% of the words in a text need terminology research (Guy Champagne, The Economic Value of Terminology, 2004), yet wrong terms caused 47% of the translation errors in General Motors’ study of its own translations (SAE J1930, Woyde 2005). A glossary goes straight at the terms behind that 47%.
Where to start
You probably already have a glossary in pieces: past translations, bilingual specifications, a spreadsheet someone kept. That is enough to build one: we turn it into your firm’s term base, and it stays yours. See our construction glossary for examples of approved pairs.
Are your translations consistent? Get a free terminology check.