To build a brand, you need consistent use of language – in other words, you need terminology management. When you create the original text, you make choices about the tone, style and impact you want it to have. This includes choices about the vocabulary you use. When the original is localised into multiple languages, the translator team will make those choices again. To make sure that the chosen terms are what you want and that they stay consistent, we work with glossaries – term bases that we can connect to each new project.
Bilingual, multilingual or even monolingual glossaries are a very useful linguistic resource for your team and ours. Sometimes, a glossary is so important that a translation will not be usable without it. If there is no glossary at the start of an assignment, we at Sandberg will often build a glossary while working on the assignment, and we are always happy to hand that over to our client. If you ask us to create a glossary with core terms and frequently occurring phrases when you order a translation, we will do that too. If a glossary is to be created upfront before any translation work starts, e.g. to coordinate and ensure consistency in the work of a team of several translators, Sandberg will charge for this.
Our translation environment of choice, memoQ, makes it very quick and easy to build up a glossary during the translation stage. The translator simply highlights the source and target term and uses a keyboard shortcut to add them to the glossary. Not all CAT tools offer this feature. Where we create a glossary upfront before starting translation work, we typically use the term extraction feature in memoQ, which is also very powerful and user-friendly. This feature uses statistical methods to determine the frequency of a given term or phrase and can automatically exclude words that are uncommon and do not need to be added. The extracted term candidates are then reviewed by the translator before they save them to the glossary.
We can deliver glossaries in any of the typical file formats that our client might require, such as in Excel.