Creating Bilingual Glossaries in Instant Text

Note: For more on text expanders please see Adding a Text Expander to My Translation Workflow and Emulating AutoSuggest Functionality with InstantText.

This is a short how-to for loading bilingual lists to Instant Text for quick glossary/termbase access in Instant Text. A big thanks to Emmanuel over at the Instant Text forum for explaining how to do this.

The short of it is that for this to work, the list needs to look like this:

source term=target term
(the = is an actual = sign)

Example:

absolute value=valor absoluto

My exported termbase from Multiterm looks like this:

source term TAB target term
(the TAB here means a tab space)

Example:
absolute value valor absoluto

If you start out with a simple text file that has the source term TAB target term sequence, the first step is to replace the tabs with =s and save the resulting file as a text file (*.txt).

Once you've done this, go to Instant Text, and right click on the Phrases Advisories, then select Importer.



In Importer, choose Formulas. In the Dialog that opens, choose the *.txt file you just created.

Enter a name for your new glossary.

Choose Yes when asked if you want to keep your current abbreviations.

And that's it!

Now go to Instant Text and click next to the word Glossaries, choose Open and select your newly created glossary.

When you double-click on it, you will see the contents of the glossary, with the source term on the left under the Short column and the target text on the right under Expansion.




With this, if your new glossary is active (either as the main glossary or as an Includes glossary), you will be able to start typing your source term and see the target term appear as the expansion when you hit the marker key.

In the example above, if I start typing addendum, I will see the bilingual entry and can expand the target form by either:

1. Writing the full word and hitting my marker key

addendum + marker key expands into anexo




or

2. Writing "adde2" (since addendum is the second entry in the list) and hitting my marker key.




Notice that for terms that have two words or more, spaces between words are eliminated when the source term is entered into the short form, as short forms don't admit spaces.




If you want to add new terms to your bilingual glossary, just remember that the target term needs to go in the Glossary Phrase Entry field and the source term, minus spaces, needs to go in the In Short field, as shown below:



By adding bilingual glossaries to Instant Text, we could have two kinds of entries available to us:

- Monolingual, to be used when you know the term and just want to take advantage of text expansion

- Bilingual, to be used when you need to refer to a specific termbase

And of course, how to organize these glossaries is entirely up to each translator. Instant Text is flexible enough to allow both monolingual and bilingual entries to coexist in the same glossary or to have separate glossaries for each.