Glossary
Note: many of the terms use an abbreviation of the form x10y where 10 stands
for the number of letters between the first letter x and the last letter y
(e.g. l10n)
- a12n
- see Africanisation
- a11y
- see Accessibility
- Accessibility
- This is the effort to make software device independent, for input, output,
and “display”. this includes screen reading software, devices controlled by
brain waves, and everything in between. This effort is mostly aimed at
ensuring that computers and devices are usable by people with disabilities.
- Africanisation
- Any activity that assists with the localisation and globalisation of software
for the African continent.
- CAT
- Computer Aided Translation. Any one of a number of tools that assist
translators during translation.
- CLDR
- see Common Locale Data Repository
- Common Locale Data Repository
- this is an effort to provide a unifies locale data repository, thus merging a
number of separate efforts. They have also defined an XML standard for
storing locale data seems to be much more flexible then current methods.
- fuzzy translation
This has two meanings:
- In Gettext translation: any string that has been modified or guessed by
the Gettext tools ie a piece of text that needs your review.
- In the localisation industry: a fuzzy string is an attempt to match the
untranslated string with information from a TM. Usually this is expressed
as a percentage eg 80% match.
- g11n
- see Globalisation
- Gettext
- A set of tools used primarily on Linux and Unix computers that makes a
program translatable. The toolset provides tools to extract messages from
programs, to manipulate the translations, to compile the translations and to
allow a program to appear translated when it is run.
- Globalisation
- FIXME
- i18n
- see Internationalisation
- Internationalisation
- this is the process of making a program localisable. This would cover work
to allow for different fonts and character sets to be displayed correctly.
To allow for scripts that run from right-to-left, etc. This work is usually
done once for a language, once the toolkits and programs support a language
the internationalsiation work is usually complete.
- l10n
- see Localisation
- l12y
- see Localisability
- l18n
- see either i18n or l10n. This is a common misspelling of one of
these words.
- Locale
- this is a file that defines the locale data for your language and country. A
locale covers things such as: the names of months and days of the week, how
to write dates in your language, how your write number and currency values,
the sort order of your language and much else. This data is essential for a
computer to support your language.
- Localisation
- This is the process of taking an existing program or operating system and
making it work in your language. This would include translating: interface
and documentation, creating a locale file and the creation of fonts. It
would not include changing the widget set or program operation to cater for
your language, that work would fall under internationalisation.
- Localisability
- This is the degree to which a program can be localized – for example, fixed
strings in a program that cannot be translated would be a localisability
issue
- m17n
- Multilingualization
- Machine Translation
- when a machine translates from one language to another. You might also hear
of Machine Assisted Translation, this is where a machine does the initial
translation usually drawing heavily on a Translation Memory and a human
translator does the final approval and correction.
- MO
- Machine Object file. This is the result of compiling a PO file using
Gettext’s msgfmt command. MO file are used because they are much quicker for
a computer to read then PO files.
- MT
- see Machine Translation
- Multilingualization
This has one several different usages:
- The UI has a user selectable choice of languages.
- The user can input data in a number of different languages.
- The user can select the output in a number of different languages.
- PO
- Portable Object file. These are the files produced by xgettext (cf.) that a
translator translates into their language. These files are compiled using
Gettext (cf.) tools into an MO file (cf.)
- PO Editor
- Any one of a number of tools that can edit PO files. PO files are plain text
files and in most cases a PO editor will hide the complexity from the
translator and provide extra features like translation memory, etc.
- TEnT
- Translation Environment Tool. A term suggested by some (Jost Zetzsche) as an
alternative to CAT (cf.).
- TM
- see Translation Memory
- TMX
- see Translation Memory Exchange format
- Translation Memory Exchange format
- TMX allows you to export, import and thus exchange translation memory data
between various CAT tools.
- Translation Memory
- to reuse existing translations you make use of a TM. It makes translation
faster but also ensures the translations remain consistent.
- Unicode
- This is a standard that is able to represent all characters for all alphabets
in one character set. By doing this you are able to display any all and any
character or language on one page. Unicode only provides the encoding you
would still need fonts to display the text.
- UI
- User Interface
- UTF-8
- A method of encoding Unicode using 8 bits. Other methods include UTF-7,
UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 is the most dominant method of encoding Unicode
characters, but UTF-16 is becoming more common.
- XLIFF
- A new file format for representing translation data. It provides much more
useful features then any current format and you will see this become more
widely adopted in future.
- xgettext
- a program which is part of the Gettext (cf.) tools that extracts translatable
content from programs and stores them in a PO (cf.) files that will be
translated by a translator.