How to use a glossary (or term base) in your translation project

This feature is available on all account tiers (including the free plan) but note that a glossary project contributes to your quota usage.

Creating a glossary

Loco glossaries are just translation projects like any other. To add new terms, simply create a new project for your glossary, and start adding common words and short phrases. Translate these into as many languages as needed.

Once your glossary is created, you can make the terms available to other projects via those projects' settings.

For example, you may have a project called "Jargon" (containing short phrases) and another called "Company website" (containing longer texts). From the "Company website" project settings, select the "Sources" tab and choose "Jargon" from the Glossaries dropdown list.

Accessing terms during translation

Once a project has a glossary attached, you can browse its terms while you translate longer segments of text. Loco will automatically scan the source text for any matching terms.

Matching terms are highlighted in the Source text pane of the editor. Clicking a highlighted term will show more detail, including translations for the current language being edited.

Managing your terms

There's nothing special about a glossary project. It's a translation project like any other. However, it's advisable to maintain your terminology using separate assets for single words or very short phrases. You might want to also tag your assets with the most relevant part of speech (e.g "Noun") and use the context or notes for further disambiguation.

Tip: Loco can import various file formats suitable for glossaries, including CSV and TBX files.

Multi-language glossaries vs multiple glossaries

A single project can be used as a glossary for all your target translations. It can also be queried in reverse, (e.g. An English→French glossary can be searched for French terms, and will show the English).

However, Loco doesn't currently provide language-specific metadata. (notes, tags, etc.. are attached at the asset level). This means that glossary lookups can't show different information for translations of the same term. One way around this is to maintain multiple glossaries. For example, by maintaining two term bases ("French→English" with metadata in French, plus "German→English" with metadata in German) you can add them both as glossaries to a third project and look up terms in all three languages.