Terminology

From translatewiki.net

This page is a front page for the translatewiki.net terminology project.

The aim is to create a monolingual terminology for each project that translatewiki.net supports. Having a terminology provides many benefits:

  • The use of terms in each project will improve while the terminology is build, because we will find ambiguous expression and terms with many competing expression. When terms are defined and used consistently, users will be less confused and learn to use the software faster. Translation will become easier when translators know exactly what thing is talked about.
  • Translators can use the monolingual terminology to translate all the terms at once. Knowing all the terms and their relations with each other helps choosing better translation for them and avoids translating two different things with same translation.
  • We can build tools which help translators to provide consistent translations.

Creating a terminology is hard work. We don't need to follow the terminology tradition 100% and produce perfect terminologies (even experts cannot do it), but we should still follow the good practices terminologists use. One most important practice is the terminological definition, which is a concise phrase that says what the term is (a kind of what?) and what distinguishes it from other closely related terms.

If you know any good guidance on terminology making, please add it here.

The steps we should follow are:

  1. Collect any existing terminologies, glossaries and word lists
  2. Start building a monolingual word list
  3. Add definitions for each term
  4. Propose changes to the project when problematic terms are encountered
  5. When terminology is nearly complete translators can start translating it

It is probably obvious that we should try to get the whole project communities involved, not just translators.

Terminologies

Collection of terminologies (as described above) for software in translated in translatewiki.net (see also Category:Glossaries):
Language-specific generic terminologies (should be also linked from local language portals) on translatewiki.net:
Project-specific terminologies on translatewiki.net:
Terminologies hosted on Wikimedia sites:

See also