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Alignment
The act of matching segments or sentences in translated
documents for importation as translation units or sentence
pairs in a translation memory tool.
Automatic Content Enrichment (ACE)
A bridge between single language websites and localization,
ACE technology associates English words and phrases on web
pages with pop-ups containing information in a user’s
native language.
Bidirectional language
Languages that are read right-to-left but which support left-to-right
words for European terms.
Character set
The characters (and their byte codes) available in an application
program. The most common is the ASCII (or ANSI) set of 128
characters, in which CAPITAL LETTER A has the code 41 in hexadecimal,
065 decimal, and 01000001 binary. Various localized character
sets are ISO 8859-1 or Latin-1, the most common encoding of
characters for Western European languages. ISO 8859-1 through
8859-15 are 256 character sets. The first 128 characters are
the same as ASCII, and the upper 128 encode Cyrillic, Hebrew,
Arabic, etc. characters.
Computer Aided Translation (CAT)
Use of a translation memory tool by a human translator.
The TM tool enables the translator not to have to translate
the same sentence twice. More importantly, it guarantees
that translations will be identical, when consistency is
a requirement for the material, and yet enables a different
translation when literary quality and creativity are prized.
DTP
The act of using software to create high-quality publications
that combine text and graphics in a sophisticated layout
following design standards. In localization it also encompasses
the act of creating and maintaining the look and feel of
the original document once translated into other languages.
Font
The glyphs or shapes that render a character on the computer
screen or on a printer. The mapping between character codes
and glyphs may be different on different operating systems.
Full match (100% match)
A segment or sentence in a source document for which the translation
memory tool has a perfect match in the target language, including
font style and various attributes like context. See fuzzy
match.
Fuzzy match (partial match)
A segment or sentence in a source document for which the
translation memory tool can match some of the words in the
target language, including font style and various attributes
like context.
Gisting
Use of machine translation to provide a rough translation
of text in order to determine its content.
Globalization (G11N)
Term describing the process of designing, developing, and
adapting a product for distribution in multiple countries.
G11N includes all the strategic and marketing preparation
that goes into global deployment of a product.
Global Content Management System (GCMS)
A translation tool designed to automate translation of website and other content that changes frequently.
Glossary
A glossary for the purposes of localization is a list of
source language terms and their definitions, paired with
a list of corresponding terms in the target language.
GUI
The acronym GUI stands for Graphical User Interface and
is synonymous with UI.
Hotkey
A keyboard shortcut used to access functions in menus and
sub-menus. A hotkey is usually represented by a mnemonic
which is shown as an underline on the menu line; the mnemonic
typically refers to the initial letter of the function
(e.g.
“Copy” = “CTRL+C”). (See shortcut
key)
Input Method
A language-specific computer keyboard or a software tool
that allows any standard keyboard to input the characters
or ideographs of a language. When the symbols exceed the
number of keys as do Asian languages, the software presents
a selection of possibilities for clicking with a mouse.
Input Method Editor
An IME may be as simple as a localized keyboard, which emits
the appropriate character codes for the local language when
the keys are struck. It may be a software program that works
with a standard keyboard and mouse to select character codes
from an onscreen display. It may generate a character code
only after a sequence of keys has been struck. More sophisticated
input methods include graphic pads that recognize a character
drawn with a stylus, and speech recognition systems.
Internationalization (I18N)
The process of designing a product so that it can be
adapted to various languages and locales without engineering
changes.
Language kit
An optional addition to an operating system that enables
its keyboard and application programs to work in the character
sets appropriate to the language, and to render its fonts.
Note that text files produced with a Greek language kit
will generally produce gibberish if read on a machine with
a Russian or Hebrew language kit. Unicode is meant to resolve
this problem.
Locale
A combination of a language and a particular geographic
region (usually a country) where the culture is distinctive
enough to merit the use of different terminology and web
page design practices. Locales usually have character sets
suited to representing their scripts, and custom fonts for
their character set.
Localization (L10N)
The act of customizing software and documentation for
a particular country. It includes the translation of the
GUI, including menus and messages, into the native spoken
language as well as changes in the user interface to accommodate
different alphabets and cultural issues.
Machine Translation (MT)
A translation tool that automatically translates text not
previously seen based either on linguistic parsing or on
similar text stored in a database.
Markup language
Surrounding text with beginning and ending tags, typically
set off in angle brackets.For example: <strong> This is bold</strong>. Translators
must take care to leave the words in the tags alone. Translation
memory tools that are markup aware (e.g., Trados, TagEditor)
do not change tags, except for certain quoted material
inside a tag's attributes. e.g. HTML, SGML, and XML.
Match
See full match or fuzzy match.
Multilingual
Refers to software that supports more than one language
simultaneously, thereby allowing the end user to select
multiple languages and formats. This software allows data
containing multiple languages to be entered, processed,
presented and transmitted in many different locales.
Multiple Language Vendor (MLV)
A relatively large localization service provider that offers
a wide range of languages and other services.
Pre-translation
Involves the preparation of usually updated files for translation
where the existing files already contain related segments
of previously translated data. Only 100% matches are replaced,
with the result being a set of files containing both source
and target language terminology.
Resizing
Text elements, especially software strings in the user interface,
may expand in some languages (such as German) during translation
and may no longer fit inside buttons, menus, dialog boxes,
etc. Localization engineers must then resize the UI elements
to accommodate the expanded text.
Segment
A part of a document, usually limited by punctuation - periods,
tabs, paragraph marks, or custom tags. The segment or sentence
is the fundamental unit of information stored in translation
memory with its corresponding bilingual matching segment.
Shortcut key
A keyboard combination used to access functions in menus
and sub-menus. The shortcut key combination is essentially
an abbreviation of the menu item command. Ctrl+V is a typical
accelerator key combination for the Paste command. When
a product is localized, this key combination is generally
not changed, i.e. the same combination (Ctrl+V) is used
in the localized version of a product. (See Hotkey)
Simship
An abbreviation for “simultaneous shipment,”
the release of multiple product versions at the same time.
Single Language Vendor (SLV)
A localization service provider that offers translation
and or localization services into only one language.
Source language
The language in which the product that is to be localized
was originally developed.
Target language
The language in which the product that is to be localized
is converted to (e.g. from US English to German).
Termbase
A terminology database, usually multilingual. The contents
of Terminology Managers. Includes fields in the database
record for each term to define the concept, provide glosses
appropriate to a subject field, source information, etc.
Terminology
A database of specialist words for a subject area or areas
used to facilitate high-quality translation. (See also Termbase)
Terminology Manager
A software tool such as Trados MultiTerm which allows easy
integration of the Termbase into the translation process.
Term list
A terminology list, usually bilingual. The input/output
text files or TBX files of Terminology Managers. Usually
in a format like comma-delimited or tab-delimited files
suitable for use with a spreadsheet.
Text expansion
Some languages are
more verbose and have greater average word lengths and therefore
designers must leave room for the extra text space needed,
in German, for example. Text expansion impacts UI design elements
and should be dealt with before translation.
Translation Memory (TM)
A translation tool that stores text segments (usually sentences)
and their translations in a database and automatically retrieves
translations for text that is already in the database (usually
from a previous version of the text). The tool may also
find similar segments and their translations to assist the
translator.
Translation unit (Trados)
A segment or sentence pair in source and target languages.
Unicode
The 16-bit standard capable of encoding the characters of
the world's major language scripts. It is designed to be
a universal character set. Version 3.0 contains 49,194 characters
and 8,515 code points for private uses and future expansions.
The limit to 16-bit encoding is 65,536 characters. Unicode
is supported on all the major computer operating systems,
as well as by HTML 4.0, XML, and X-HTML.
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