# Terminology

Pootle can help translators with terminology. Terminology can be specified to be global per language, and can be overridden per project for each language. A project called terminology (with any full name) can contain any files that will be used for terminology matching. Alternatively a file with the name pootle-terminology.po (in a PO project) can be put in the directory of the project, in which case the global one (in the terminology project) will not be used. Matching is done in real time.

Ideally, the source term should be the shortest, simplest form of a word. Therefore cat, dog, house are good, but cats, dogged and housing are bad.

Context indicators are allowed in the source text, in brackets after the term, but keep them short, eg file (noun), view (verb), etc.

The ideal is therefore that the target term be something that you’d like the translator to be able to insert... but strictly speaking the target text can be anything, including a definition.

If the terminology PO file has translator comments, they will be displayed as a tooltip in Pootle.

## What does it do?

If our glossary has an entry: file->lêer, and we translate a sentence like The file was not found, we can suggest the glossary entry file->lêer as relevant to the translation, even if we don’t have any TM entry that is related to the complete sentence that is available for translation.

Say our glossary has an entry category->kategorie and we translate a sentence like Please enter the categories for this photo, we can suggest the glossary entry category->kategorie, even though the letters category doesn’t occur anywhere in the original string.

## Limits

Currently a single term entry can be up to 30 characters long (including context information), and the first 500 characters of each translation are scanned. Terms can consist of many words, but consider making them as general or simple as possible for maximum impact.

If these limits prove too restrictive, feel free to point out use cases where this is not sufficient.

Since the terminology matching is performed in real-time, you might want to keep an eye on the size of your terminology project to ensure that performance is not affected too much by having too many terms. This is highly dependent on your server abilities and the nature of what you are translating.

## Generating terminology

New in version 2.1.

Project administrators can generate a list of frequently occurring terms from the Terminology tab in the Pootle interface, which can help to quickly standardize some frequently occurring terms. It is also possible to add extra entries. This is based on the poterminology tool from the Translate Toolkit.