Translation glossary: fix your terms before you translate

What a translation glossary is

A translation glossary is a list of terms with one rule for each: keep it as it is, or always translate it with the same word in each language. It is short, it belongs to your company, and every translation uses it, whether a person, an agency or a program translates. Our guide on translating your website covers addresses, hreflang and review. This guide is about the list itself.

Without a glossary, the same thing gets different names. The checkout button says basket on one page and cart on the next, a plan name is translated in an email but not on the price page, and support cannot tell which product a customer means.

Which terms belong in it

• Brand, product, model and plan names, such as the name of your shop or of a product line.
• Words of your interface: buttons, menu entries, the steps of the checkout and the names of account areas.
• Technical terms of your field that you always want to say the same way.
• Terms that are easy to mistranslate because they have several meanings.
• Words that must stay in another language, such as titles of works or quoted names.

Leave out ordinary words. A glossary with several hundred entries is hard to maintain. Start with the terms that appear most often and cause the most confusion.

One rule for each term

Each entry needs a decision. Most glossaries use three answers: never translate, always use a fixed term, or leave the word to the translator. The question below helps with the first choice.

What a good entry contains

• The term in the source language, in its basic form.
• The rule: never translate, or fixed term.
• For a fixed term: the target term for each language, also in its basic form.
• A short note: what the term means, where it appears, and which variants are wrong.
• Who decided and when, so that later changes can be traced.

Inflection and form of address

German and Polish change the form of a word for plural, case and gender. A glossary entry gives the basic form, and the translator inflects it as the sentence needs. Write in the note when a term must not be inflected, which is often true for brand names. Decide the form of address as well, for example du or Sie in German and ty or Pan/Pani in Polish, and put it at the top of the glossary.

Consistent across languages

When you add a language, translate the glossary first and the pages second. Check that every fixed term exists in every language you publish, and that two different source terms do not end up with the same target term. When you change a term, change it in all languages and in older texts, or note where the old term is still in use. A simple test: search all pages of one language for each wrong variant that the glossary lists.

Who owns the glossary

Give the glossary one owner, for example the person responsible for the website or for marketing. Translators and colleagues may suggest new terms, but only the owner adds or changes entries. Keep it in one place that everyone uses, such as a shared table or the glossary of your translation tool, and not as copies in emails. Share the current version with every agency or freelancer before they start, and ask them to report terms that are missing.

Marking text that must not be translated

A glossary tells people and programs which words to keep. In HTML you can also mark such text directly. The W3C describes the translate attribute: with the value no it tells translation tools not to translate the content of an element, and the setting applies to everything inside that element. It has no effect on how the page looks. The examples the W3C gives include brand names, code samples, titles of works and labels on devices. The W3C page also notes that not every translation tool supports it in the same way.

For larger translation projects, the W3C Internationalization Tag Set (ITS 2.0) defines more such information. Translate says whether content is meant for translation, Terminology marks terms and can link them to a definition or a term database, and Localization Note passes notes to translators.

Work with Do4U

Build a glossary creates a glossary from a page of your website, with further pages of the same site if you want, or from a text you paste, for the target languages you choose. The code finds brand, product and model names, terms from the page title, headings and navigation, terms with trademark signs and repeated word groups. The AI suggests a rule for each term, never translate, a fixed term per language or ignore, with a short reason. You tick the rows you want and take them into the glossary of your account with one click, or download them as CSV. Nothing goes into your glossary without your click.

Translate HTML and Language files read this glossary in every job: terms marked never translate stay as they are, and fixed terms are used in the target language. The plain text translation does not read the glossary yet. The fixed terms are suggestions. The code checks their form, not whether the translation is right, so let a native speaker check them. Do4U builds a draft, you check and decide.