Glossary of the Translation Industry

Glossary of the Translation Industry for clients and students of the translation industry.
  • Accreditation: A formal process to evaluate and assess the competence of a translator. In the USA such accreditation is provided by the American Translators Association. In some countries accreditation or certification can carried out by a government agency.
  • Agglutination: In linguistics it is the combination of short words to create a single compound word that expresses compound ideas.
  • Apostille or Apostil: The Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement for Legalization for Foreign Public Documents, the Apostille convention, or the Apostille treaty is an international treaty drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. It specifies the modalities through which a document issued in one of the signatory countries can be certified for legal purposes in all the other signatory states. Such a certification is called an apostille (French: certification). It is an international certification comparable to a notarization in domestic law, and normally supplements a local notarization of the document.
  • Back translation: The process of translating a translated text back into the original language for quality assurance purposes.
  • Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU): An algorithm that evaluates the quality of translated text. It works by comparing the translated text to a well translated reference text.
  • Bitext: A document file in which both the source language and the target language appear. These files are usually used to align segments of original text with the equivalent target language translation
  • Certified Translation: A certified translation has a different meaning depending on the country which requires it. In the USA in means that the translator has signed the translation before a notary public certifying to the accuracy of a translation and that he or she are qualified and competent to render an accurate translation. Such a certified translation is legally valid in the USA. Other countries often require that certified translators are officially accredited.
  • Civil Law: A legal system conceived under the framework of Roman law in which its principles are codified into a system of primary source law (as in France and Latin America). In contrast, common law systems (such as in the USA and England) are based on a judicial precedent framework which gives precedence to prior court decisions on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions.
    Finding equivalence when translating between Civil Law and Common Law requires the skills of a highly specialized and trained legal translator.
  • CNS: The Chinese National Standard defines a total of 48 thousand characters.
  • Code Sweep: In the translation industry code sweep refers to a software quality assurance tool that scans programming code and identifies characters that could cause problems.
    This software is useful when projects involve translation from one character set to another one.
  • Common Law: A legal system based on judicial precedent (such as in the USA, England, Canada and Australia). See Civil Law. Legal translations between Common Law and Civil Law not only require language equivalency but legal system equivalency which requires a professional legal translator.
  • Computational Linguistics: The systems that process and analyze written or spoken language.
  • Computer Aided Translation (CAT): CAT or Computed-Aided Translation is a computer and software-based technology to assist in the human translation process. This is not a machine doing the translation, but rather a computer-based translation environment that helps human translators be more accurate, consistent, and productive.
  • Consecutive Interpreting: Interpreter speaks (translates) after speaker allows time for the interpretation.
  • Content Management System (CMS): CMS is a system that stores and manages large amounts of information in a structured way.
  • Controlled Authoring: The process that integrates writing and localization so that text can be written for reuse and improve translation productivity.
  • Controlled Language: A subset of a language with restricted grammar and terminology aimed at reducing ambiguity.
  • Corpus: A large body of natural language text used to accumulate natural language statistics.
    Translation engines use statistical methods to carry out machine translations based on large translation corpus databases. Proponents argued that the larger the corpus, the more accurate the automated translation will be.
  • Creole: A stable and full-fledged language that originates from the combination of two or more languages.
    There are many examples of creole languages. Haitian Creole and Belizean Creole are two examples.
  • Crowdsourcing: Translation crowdsourcing is an open call to outsource a job to a large group of people who are generally unknown. In the translation industry this is the practice of obtaining translation services by soliciting translation work from a large group of people online.
    Crowdsourcing is used successfully to translate very large websites, such as social media properties. But its drawback is uneven quality. Crowdsourcing is not a reliable procedure for highly sensitive of complex text.
    More on Crowdsourcing .
  • Cyrillic Alphabet: A family of alphabets used in Slavic languages including Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and others.  It is an official alphabet of the EU.
  • Desktop Publishing (DTP): The process of laying out text and graphics to publish documents, magazines, etc.
  • Dialect: A variety of a language spoken by people in a specific geographic region.
    The most common definition of dialect in the translation industry is any variety of language that must be taken into account to carry out translation or interpretation work.
    Dialect differences can be based on social class, ethnicity, regional differences, pronunciation and usage preferences.
  • Double Byte Languages: Languages that use twice the memory because their characters are more complex than Roman alphabet characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
  • Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS): A character set in which characters are encoded with two bits.
  • Dubbing: The process of substituting voices in a movie, TV program or video with a different language voice.
  • Extensible Markup Language (XML): An international standard to publish and transmit electronic information. It was designed specifically for the Web.
  • Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL): A set or s a family of recommendations for defining XML document transformation and presentation.
  • FIGS: Acronym for French, Italian, German and Spanish.
  • Freelance Translator: An independent translator who works as a contractor for third parties.
  • Fuzzy Match: When a phrase or sentence (segment) in a translation memory database is similar to the current sentence, but not 100% identical.
  • Globalization: In translation projects, globalization refers to the process of launching a product or service globally with localized content with the purpose of supporting local efforts.
    What does globalization really mean? The world is conducting business in thousands of different languages and dialects 24 hours a day. Today globalization represents both opportunity and risk for global organizations, agencies and governments.
    It is an opportunity because of the potential to open new markets and supply sources. It is a risk because globalizing content is expensive and there might be a very return on investment.
    Globalization in the translation industry refers to everything from globalization decision making process to the implementation of globalization initiatives.
  • Glocalization: A combination of two words, globalization and localization. It generally refers to the community who can think globally and act locally. The premise is that the globalization of a product or service will succeed if it is adapted to specific localities and cultures.
  • Internationalization: The process of enabling software products to handle multiple languages and cultural conventions such as currency, dates, and local regulatory requirements.
  • Lexicography: Lexicography is divided into two disciplines.
    Practical lexicography – The act of compiling and writing dictionaries.
    Theoretical lexicography is a scholar discipline that describes various linguistic relationships in the vocabulary of a language.
    In language translations the discipline of practical lexicography creates bilingual dictionaries which are a primary tool for translators.
    In the translation industry we use the word terminology that refers to translation glossaries. There are differences between lexicography and terminology. For more on these differences, download this PDF.
  • Lingua Franca: A common language amongst speakers of different languages.
  • Localization: The procedure of adapting software, advertising or other communications to specific regions or cultures by adapting languages, grammar and writing conventions. It might involve changing script, fonts, layouts and other variables.
  • Machine Aided Translation (MAT): Computer technology that supports the human translation process.
  • Machine Translation: Computer technology that translates text from one human language to another.
  • MENA: MENA is a common acronym that refers to the Middle East and North Africa.
  • Morphology: Morphology is the study of structure and form of words.
  • Multilingual Projects: In Translation Projects multilingual projects involve the translation of a text into two or more languages.
    In Language multilingual refers to something that is in or uses several languages.
    In software it means that the product supports more than one language simultaneously.
  • Multilingual Workflow System (MWS): Software that supports the development and deployment of products that can be used in a multilingual environment.
  • Optical Character Recognition (OEM): A computer process that translates text images into machine-editable text.
  • Pre-translation: The use a translation memory database to detect pre-translated text in a new document.
  • Project Management: In the translation process it refers to the action of planning, organizing and controlling human and other resources to complete a project on time and within budget.
  • Project Manager: The professional manager responsible for executing the translation project management.
  • Quality Assurance: The process that provides confidence amongst stakeholders that the work/project satisfy with the quality requirements.
  • Register: The quality or variety of language. The most common example is formal vs. informal language.
    For language translations also refer to the complexity of the language. Accepted translation practices strive to translate at the same register.
    For more on register, visit here.
  • Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT): Software algorithms that apply sets of linguistic and grammatical rules to find correspondences between one source language and a target language.
  • Simplified Chinese Characters: It is a Chinese character set that was simplified by the People’s Republic of China in an effort to promote literacy.
  • Simultaneous Interpretation: When the interpreter translates the message into the target language while the speaker is speaking.   
  • Source Language: The language that is to be translated or interpreted.
  • Statistical Machine Translation: A statistically based translation model for computers that use statistical models to analyze bilingual text corpora.
  • Target Language: The language into which the text is being translated or interpreted.
  • Traditional Chinese: One of the two main Chinese character sets. It is thousands of years old and today it is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
  • Translation: The process of converting words and meanings from a source language to their equivalent in the target language.
  • Translation Agency: A company that provides translation and interpreting services.
  • Translation Memory (TM): A database of previously translated sentences which can be reused in future projects.
  • Translation Memory eXchange (TMX): An open XML standard to automate the process of converting translation memories from one file format to another.
  • Translation Portal: A website that offers a broad range of translation resources and services.
  • Transliteration: Writing words in one alphabet closely corresponding to a different alphabet or language. This is usually done phonetically.
  • Unicode: The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard (Unicode) is global character encoding standard used for computer processing that currently supports more than 1 million different characters in all languages.
    Using Unicode characters in software, localization and translations simplifies the management of multilingual content.
  • Voiceover: The process of substituting one audio track in one language with another audio track in a different language. LanguageTran offers voiceover services.

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