Understanding Glossaries

Learn about Glossaries in Transifex, and how they're used when translating.

Jacob avatar
Written by Jacob
Updated over a week ago

A glossary is a set of case-sensitive/insensitive key terms and their definitions, parts of speech, and translations. It's helpful to provide your translators with a glossary if you're translating industry-specific terms or want a particular word to be translated the same way every time.

This reduces guesswork and, in turn, keeps your translations more consistent.

If you're working with a translation agency, they may be able to help you create a glossary.


Glossaries in Transifex

As soon as you create a project in Transifex and link it with a glossary, the target languages for your project will be generated automatically within the assigned Glossary.

Let's say there are two projects, Project 1 and Project 2, that share a common Glossary, and their respective target languages are Italian and French. In that case, the Glossary will automatically have Italian and French as its target languages.

In Transifex, each glossary term is made of several parts:

  • Term – This is the word or phrase you add to the Glossary. The term should be in the same language as your project's source language.

  • Part of speech – Which part of speech the term is.

  • Translation – How the term should be translated in each project language.

  • Note – Any additional notes you want to add about a term or translation, e.g., the definition of a term.

Glossary terms are automatically underlined inside the Editor, so translators know to reference the Glossary when translating that string.

You can define how strict glossary compliance is when the translations are saved.

  • Warning: Glossary terms are highly visible suggestions. Translators who don’t use them get a warning but can save the translation without the suggested Glossary term.

  • Error: Glossary terms have to be used. Translators who don’t use them get an error message and can’t save their translations without the suggested Glossary term.

You can set this in the Translation checks.


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