This is a follow up post to the previous one, in which I asked your thoughts on what are good practices when building a glossary.
This time I’m going to tell you what we, at Interpreters’ Help, believe is good practice. This is also what is taught at certain schools.
A good glossary has:
- A precise name in opposition to broad one
- A short description
- No more than 300 lines
- Short cell content (no more than 10 words)
Applied to Interpreters’ Help:
- It has relevant tags
- Use columns already available in the list whenever possible, as it provides coherence between your different glossaries
To the question: is it better to have one big glossary or a lot of small ones ?
We think it’s better to have a lot of small glossaries and we have built Interpreters’ Help around that idea.
While only one glossary has the advantage of having everything in one place, it has also downsides:
- if you lose it, you lose everything
- A big file means a slower search, more noise in the search results, more doubles
- It acts rather like a database, it looses the specificity
Having multiple glossaries makes it easier to keep a history of glossaries for a specific assignment, makes it easier to reuse and to collaborate on.
On Interpreters’ Help, we currently have two tools that let you search through all your glossaries, select or deselect a glossary really quickly to be or not added in your search.
- « BoothMate » a dedicated Mac OSX that let you search without the need of an Internet connection.
- « Global search » which is an online search (it’s currently in beta, available here: https://interpretershelp.com/global_search when signed in)
Here is an article from AIIC on the subject: http://aiic.net/page/7151/a-survey-of-glossary-practice-of-conference-interpreters
