Terminology management is an ancillary service that is particularly useful and valuable for large or frequent translation projects. It consists of creating glossaries and translation memories that are customized for the client. They are tools that optimize the translation process by ensuring consistency of terminology and style in the translated texts for the same company and that save the customer time and money.
During the translation process, the translator refers to the glossary and the translation memory that were specially created for the customer, thereby ensuring that the terms used are suitable and that they are maintained throughout the text and in subsequent texts. Oltrelingua collects and extrapolates the specific terminology, creating terminology databases that can be reused on subsequent projects for the same client. In this way, the translation process is accelerated and optimized, which positively impacts the final price because the translator is effectively facilitated in his work.
A glossary is a collection of words related to a specific field, which may be bilingual or multilingual. When the customer requires this service, before proceeding to the actual translation, we conduct a preliminary extraction of terminology to identify specific technical terms in the text to be translated. Based on these drafts, a glossary of terms is assigned to corresponding future translations. This glossary will serve as a guide for the translator regarding the choice of terms to be used and subsequent translation projects will continue to be updated to include the new terms presented by the new text. We can create glossaries from scratch or based on the documents already produced by the company.
A translation memory is a special type of database used in Computer Aided Translation programs (CAT Tools), which are specific software designed to assist the translation process. The translation memory stores the sentences of a text in the original language along with its translation in a given foreign language. Translating using a translation memory allows the translator to speed up the process, since all the sentences that are translated are recorded in the memory. If the same phrase occurs later on in the text (in whole or in part), it is translated automatically. We can create a translation memory from scratch with the texts that the customer has had translated in the past, or from other previously translated texts (in which case, we will need to compare the original and the translated text), in both cases the translation memory is a valuable support tool and an investment for future translations.