Industry Glossary

This page gladly serves to save you an awkward exchange with your resident techno-geek by quickly, and concisely, explaining away any acronyms or esoteric terms.

Term Translation
CAT Computer Aided Translation - computer applications which assist humans in the act of translating text from one language to another.
Clean A clean file is a file with no trados (or other CAT tool software) tags, and which is not bilingual. In order to “clean up” a bilingual file (a .bak or a .ttx, for example), we run this file through Trados and click on “clean up”. Trados will remove the source text and tags, and put the target text into the original file in place of the source text. The end result is a normal file (Word, Excel, HTML file, etc) in the target language.
CMS Content Mangement System - a system used to create, edit, manage and publish web content in a consistently organized manner.
FTP File Transfer Protocol is a way of transfering data from one computer to another through a network such as the internet. Often used when files are too large to be attached to an email, such as high resolution PDFs.
Interpretation vs Translation Interpretation is facilitating oral and sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or more users of different languages. Whereas translation is the action of processing the meaning of a text and producing an equivalent text, also called a translation, that communicates the same message in another language. Simply put, translation is written, interpretation is spoken.
Keywords In simple terms, keywords are a selection of words which best sumise the content of your website.  Web-Translations, for example, uses ‘translation, website translation, multilingual websites,’ and so on, as keywords.  These are the words people wanting to find us on the internet would type into a search engine.
Language vs Dialect A language, very briefly, is defined by country borders, demographics and history. In contrast, a dialect is a characteristic of a particular group of a language’s speakers: mostly used when refering to social class or regional speech patterns. For example, Portuguese is a language, of which European and Brazillian Portuguese are the dialects.
Localisation Adapting a product, software, website or brand for a specific international language or culture so that it seems natural to that region.  Considerations include language, culture, customs, currencies and writing systems.
MT Machine Translation - computer technology which, using complex algorhythms, translates text from one human language into another.
Metadata Literally, metadata is ‘data about data.’  As such, it is information hidden in the code of your web pages which describe the content and, in turn, allow search engines to categorise your website.
Proofreading Proofreading, in this realm, is having a second, native-speaking specialist translator check the work of the initial translator for spelling, grammar, formatting and terminology errors to ensure the best possible target text is achieved.
Repetitions Also known as reps, are units (phrases/sentences/words) which occur more than once throughout a translation. These are discounted when translation is being bought because, once a unit has been translated, Trados places it wherever else that unit occurs in the text.
SEO Search Engine Optimisation - various techniques which are used to improve the search engine rankings of a website.
SERPS Search Engine Results Page - the list of web-pages returned in response to a keyword query on a search engine.
Source Text This is the text (either in a word document, web page, pdf, graphic, flash) you supply us with for translation.
Target Text This is the text we supply back to you, once it has been translated into the target language(s) that you requested.
TM Translation Memory - a type of database that is used in software programs designed to aid human translators, a TM stores phrases, paragraphs or sentences which have been previously translated and regurgetates them when matched in a new text for translation.
 Trados Trados - is translation software used by freelancers.
.ttx file A bilingual Trados file which matches source text units to target text units