If you're managing translations for your company, you've probably heard about the importance of a Glossary. But what exactly is it, and how does it make a difference? Let's dive into it.
What is a Glossary?
A Glossary is a collection of key terms and their approved translations in different languages. Think of it as a specialized dictionary tailored specifically for your company's content. Each entry contains the source term, its translation, and any additional information you would like to add like context notes or forbidden terms.
Fun fact: Glossary terms can be more than one word, and its translation can be in the same source language as the Glossary term, which helps prevent the term from being translated.
How Does a Glossary Help Companies?
A well-managed Glossary brings significant advantages:
- Consistency across translations. When everyone uses the same terminology, your content stays coherent across languages. Whether it's a product name, a technical term, or a marketing slogan, the Glossary ensures it's translated the right way.
- Faster translation process. Translators don't need to second-guess company-specific terms, or manually check the previous translations as Glossary terms are automatically taken into account during the Pre-Translate step.
- Improved translation quality. Having a set of pre-approved terms reduces errors and variations. This leads to higher quality translations that truly reflect your brand's voice and expertise.
- Better collaboration. A Glossary acts as a reference for everyone involved in the project—internal teams, external translators, and reviewers. It sets clear expectations and minimizes misunderstandings.
- Time and cost savings. By reducing the time needed for revisions and ensuring consistency from the start, companies can lower overall translation time and costs.
How Does the Glossary Work in Redokun?
In Redokun, the Glossary feature is available for Basic and Premium plan holders, and is seamlessly integrated into the translation workflow. This helps maintain consistency and stick to your brand's preferred terminology.
Redokun’s Glossary is easy to set up and even easier to use:
- Centralized management. You can build and manage your Glossary directly in Redokun. Add new terms, update existing ones, or delete outdated entries in just a few clicks.
- Pre-translate with Glossary integration. Even when you use Redokun's Pre-translate feature to generate draft translations with machine translation (we offer DeepL and Google Translate), the system takes your Glossary into account—ensuring that your key terms are correctly applied right from the start.
- Automatic suggestions. If there is a term from the Glossary present, Redokun automatically highlights it and suggests the correct translation in the Web Editor. Glossary terms are underlined in the source text column for easy visibility.
- If the Glossary term is used correctly within the translation, it will be underlined in green and nothing needs to be done.
- If the Glossary term is not used correctly within the translation, it will be underlined in yellow and the translator can hover over the Glossary term to see what the correct translation is and edit the translation.
- Once the translation has been corrected the Glossary term will be underlined in green. This means translators can translate faster and more confidently.
- Import and export options. If you already have a list of key terms, you can import them into Redokun to save time. You can also export your Glossary whenever needed.
- Collaboration friendly. Glossaries are shared across your team’s projects, making sure that everyone—translators, reviewers, project managers—has access to the same information.
When Should You Start Using a Glossary?
Ideally, you should set up your Glossary at the beginning of your translation projects, especially if you plan to translate a large volume of content or work with multiple translators. However, it's never too late to create one! Even if you’re mid-project, a Glossary can still greatly improve your workflow and results.
Wrapping Up
A Glossary is one of the simplest yet most powerful tools you can use to improve your translation projects. By ensuring consistency, speeding up the translation process, and enhancing quality, it protects your brand’s voice across all languages.
Redokun makes it easy to create, manage, and use a Glossary—giving you one more way to streamline your multilingual content strategy.
Interested in learning more? Book a personalized demo with me from here.
Until next time!
Lynn
