Glossaries
Glossaries are files that are
created and updated manually for
use in OmegaT.
If an OmegaT project contains
one or more glossaries, any
terms in the glossary which are also found in the active segment will
be automatically displayed in the Glossary
viewer.
Usage
To use an existing glossary,
simply place it in the /glossary
folder after creating the project. OmegaT automatically detects
glossary files in this folder when a project is opened. Terms in the
active segment which OmegaT finds in the glossary file(s) are displayed
in the Glossary pane:

The word before the = sign is the source term, and its translation is
(or are) the words behind =. The vocabulary entry can have a comment
added (see "transitive verb" for the second item). The
glossary function only
finds exact matches with the
glossary entry (e.g. does not find inflected forms etc.). New
terms can
be added
manually to the glossary file(s) during translation (for example in a
text editor), but newly added terms will not be recognized until the
project is reloaded.
File
format
Glossary files are simply plain
text files containing
three-column, tab-delimited lists with the source and target terms in
the first and second columns respectively. The third column can be used
for additional information. Glossary files can be either in
system default encoding (and indicated by the extension .tab
)
or in UTF-8 (the extension .utf8
).
The Unicode encoding (UTF8) is to be preferred for obvious
reasons.
How
to create glossaries
The method here is foolproof, when followed in a reasonably careful
fashion. You
need OpenOffice Writer for it, so - if you haven't already done so
- download and install OpenOffice.org. Launch
OpenOffice.org and open an new text document or launch "OpenOffice
Writer".
In the empty document, enter your glossary terms as follows:
a source-language term, tabspace, the
target-language term , tabspace, a comment or explanation for the item,
and a Return. Tabspace is the tabulator key on the lefthand
side of the keyboard. If you do not want to add any comments, you can
drop the second tabspace. A "term" can be a single word or a whole
phrase. On the second line, enter the second term and its translation
in the same way. Then the third term pair on the third line, and so on.
When you have finished entering the terms, you will have two "columns"
of terms, source-language terms on the left and their target-language
terms on the right, and possibly a third column, containing you
comments and explanations, The tabspace (→
in the example below)
and Enter (¶ ) characters can be made visible by
clicking on the ¶ icon in the
Writer's Standard
writer bar. Here's a few lines of an English
-German
glossary)
word →Wort→das (-/e/s, Wörter/-e)¶
small house→Häuschen→das,
(pl Häuschen)¶
dog →Hund→f Hündin ¶
horse→Pferd→f Stutte¶
Do NOT use OpenOffice.org's "columns"
function to create columns: just separate each source and
target-language term pair with a single
tabspace.
When you are finished with the entries, Select File >
Save As.
In the "File location" box, enter a name for your glossary file,
followed by the extension ".utf8"
(e.g.
"MyGlossary.utf8"). For
"Filter",
select "Text
Encoded (.txt.)".
Uncheck the
"Automatic
file name extension" box and
activate "Edit
filter settings":

Confirm with OK. A dialog box appears with two options: "Yes"
and
"No".
Select "Yes"
to save in
text encoded file format.
In the ASCII Filter Options dialog
(see below),
select "Unicode
(UTF-8)" as the character set:

Confirm with OK.
After creating an OmegaT project, copy or move this file into the
project's \glossary
folder. If the project is already open, reload it
after copying the glossary file. You can make changes to a
glossary
file whilst it is being used in project, but they will not become
visible in
the project until it is reloaded.
When a segment containing a source-text term is opened, the
glossary pane will display glossary entries for those items in the
source segment that canb be found in the glossary (or glossaries - you
can have more than one available).
Using
Trados Multiterm
Glossaries created using Trados
Multiterm's text export
function for example can be used as OmegaT glossaries without further
modification, provided they are given the file extension .tab
and the source and target term fields are the first two fields
respectively. If you export using the system option "Tab-delimited
export", you will need to delete the first 5 columns (Seq. Nr, Date
created etc) before the two items of interest.
Common
glossary
problems
- Problem: No
glossary terms
are displayed.
- Possible causes:
- no glossary file in the
"glossary" folder
- glossary file is empty
- the items are not separated
with a TAB character
- the glossary file does not
have the correct extension (.tab
or .utf8)
- There is not an EXACT match
between the glossary entry and the source text in your document - for
instance when the item is in plural
- the glossary file does not
have the correct encoding
- there are no terms in the
active segment which match any
terms in the glossary
- one or more of the above
problems may have been fixed, but
the project has not been reloaded.
- Problem: In
the glossary
pane, some characters are not
displayed properly (but the same characters are displayed properly in
the Editing pane).
- Possible causes:
- the extension and
the file encoding do not match.