Word definitions
Here we have gathered a few of the technical and linguistic terms that you may come in contact with in conjunction with our services.
African languages
"African Languages" are not a language group as such, but this term is used to group the languages spoken in the geographic region of Africa.
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Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afro-Asiatic language family has its roots in northern Africa and the Middle East.
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AIIC
The Association International des Interprètes de Conference
AIIC is a professional organization for conference interpreters (oral translation in real time).
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Alignment
Alignment is a process by which, with the aid of a tool, one creates a translation memory from two similar texts in different languages.
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Asian languages
"Asian Languages" are not a language group as such, but this term is used to group the languages spoken in the geographic area of Asia. Often refers primarily to the languages spoken in eastern Asia (Japan, China, North and South Korea), South Asia (including India and Pakistan) and Southeast Asia (including Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore).
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Authorized Interpreters
An authorized interpreter has passed a government skills test that covers the areas of social services, healthcare, general insurance, labor and labor markets, and day to day law.
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Baltic languages
The Baltic languages are part of the Indo-European family of languages and are closely related to the Slavic languages.
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Bantu languages
The Bantu languages form a subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, which comprises around 500 languages. The Bantu language groups includes such languages as Swahili and Zulu.
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Basque
Basque is a language spoken in parts of Spain and France, and is considered unrelated to other languages.
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Cantonese
Cantonese is a spoken dialect of Chinese and is spoken in southern China, in the regions surrounding Canton, and in Hong Kong.
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Castilian
Castilian is another name for Spanish.
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Catalan
Catalan is a Romance language spoken in northeastern Spain.
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Character set
(Eng. character set)A character set is a defined set of characters for data processing in which each character is assigned an integer.
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Chinese
Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language and comprises many different dialects, but all are written using the same system.
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Consecutive Interpretation
The interpreter interprets passages while the speaker is still speaking (so called consecutive interpretation). This can be done during a conversation, or during a conference, where the interpreter stands on the podium together with the speaker.
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ContextTM
Context TM, previously called Xtranslate, is a tool in the Trados family that is used for pre-translations.
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Czechoslovakian
Czechoslovakian is not an actual language, but an artificial collective term for Czech and Slovak.
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De facto
The term "de facto" is sometimes used to denote the language that is most often used in a country.
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Display text
All text that the user sees on the screen in a program.
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DTD
Document Type DefinitionA DTD consists of rules dictating how documents of a certain type should or must be structurally designed. Rules are written by someone who wishes to describe a document type in a formal fashion.
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DTP
Desktop PublishingDTP is a comprehensive term used to describe the production of printed matter in modern layout programs.
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EU languages
The European Union now has more than 20 official languages that are used in EU contexts.
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European languages
”European Languages" can mean different things in different contexts.
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Farsi
Farsi, even called Persian, is an Indo-European language that is spoken in countries including Iran, Tadzjikistan, Kurdistan and Afghanistan.
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Farsi
Farsi is an Indo-European language that is spoken in countries including Iran, Tadzjikistan, Kurdistan and Afghanistan.
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Filipino
Filipino is one of the two official languages of the Philippines, the other being English. The official name of the language is Tagalog.
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Flemish
Flemish is the name for the Dutch dialects spoken in Belgian Flanders.
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Fonts
(typeface)A font is a complete set of characters, numbers and symbols with a specific appearance given a common name.
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Germanic languages
Germanic languages comprise a group within the Indo-European language family and contain about 50 different languages.
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Hangul
Hangul is the name for the Korean written language and is a phonetic written language.
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Healthcare Interpreter
The name for an authorized interpreter who has passed special certification tests for interpretation in the healthcare and hospital systems.
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Hollandic
Hollandic is the name for the Dutch dialects spoken in the North Holland and South Holland regions of the Netherlands.
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HTML
Hypertext Markup LanguageHTML is a presentation-oriented language for structured hypertext documents and is intended only for use on the world wide web. It is a specific type of SGML document.
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Hybrid translation
Hybrid translation is a technique that combines the use of Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools and machine translation.
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Indo-European languages
The Indo-European language family is the most widespread language family in the world and has its origins in Europe and Asia.
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Interpreter Services
Interpreting is oral translation from one language to another.
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Kurdish
Kurdish is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Iranian language group, and is spoken by some 20–30 million people.
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Language family
A language family is a group of related languages, probably stemming from a common root language.
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Language group
Language families comprise large groups of related languages. They are in turn divided into language groups.
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Legal Interpreters
The name for an authorized interpreter who has passed special certification tests for interpretation in the justice system and legal professions.
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Lingua Franca
Lingua Franca is Latin and is used to denote a language that unites two people with different native tongues, i.e., the language they use to communicate with one another.
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Localization
The term localization refers to linguistic and cultural adaptation
of a text or a product.
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Machine translation
Machine translation entails translation with the help of a machine, usually a computer.
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Mandarin
Mandarin is a group of spoken dialects of Chinese spoken in large parts of northern and southwestern China.
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Markup Languages
(Eng. markup language)A markup language is a set of rules describing in technical terms how a document may specify information about its structure and processing and/or the presentation of the content.
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Matching
Matches are either exact or fuzzy, meaning that there is a degree of similarity between the source text segment and a previously translated source text segment.
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Nordic languages
The Nordic languages are a sub-group of the Germanic languages.
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Official language
A country's official language is the language in which its laws, judgements and official rulings are written and is used by the country's government and administrations.
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Original language
The original language is always the language in which the text was written, and generally the same as the source language in the translation context.
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Pre-translation
'Pre-translation' is a way of automatically re-using translated parts of a document using previous translations in order to save time.There are many different ways of pre-translating a text.
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Romance languages
The Romance languages are a group within the Indo-European language family that arose from the spoken form of Latin, so called Vulgar Latin.
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Romany
Romany, or Romani, is a group of languages spoken by the various groups of the Roma people.
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RTF
Rich Text FormatRTF is a file format based on a specification for coding formatted text and graphics.
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Segment
A segment is the text unit that the CAT tool summons one by one from the text to be translated.
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Semitic languages
The Semitic language group is a sub-group of the Afro-Asian language family.
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Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian was previously used as a collective term for Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.
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Simultaneous Translation
The most common method of conference interpretation. The interpreter sits in an interpreter's booth with headphones and interprets what the speaker is saying at the same time that the speaker is talking. Spectators also have headphones and hear the interpretation immediately.
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Slavic languages
The Slavic language group is a sub-group of the Indo-European language family.
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Source language
The source language is the language FROM which a text (the source text) is to be translated, in other words, usually the language used to write the source text.
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String
A string can be the same as a display text, but it can also be a text that users normally do not see, with the exception perhaps of the system administrator.
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Styles
A style is a special manner of presenting characters within the same font (e.g., italic, bold).
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Subtitling
(Eng. subtitling)The conversion of the speech in a film or TV program to written words on the screen, usually as a translation from a foreign language. Subtitling has been used since film was first introduced in the late 1920s, primarily in areas with smaller language populations (dubbing is much more expensive). The text, often somewhat shortened, is usually shown in one or two lines at the bottom of the screen.
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Tagalog
Tagalog is one of the two official languages of the Philippines, the other being English. The language is also called Filipin or Filipino.
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Tags
(Eng. tags)Tags are used in markup languages (such as HTML and XML) to structure the text information.
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Tags
(Eng. tags)Tags are used in markup languages (such as HTML and XML) to structure the text information.
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Target language
The Target Language is the language that the source text is to translated TO.
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Technical visits
So called foreign delegations that visit a place, Stockholm city, for example, to study how the city runs operations such as pre-schools, retirement homes, or municipal companies.
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Translation
The written translation of texts, as opposed to interpretation and subtitling.
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Translation memory
(Eng. TM, translation memory) A database in which translations are stored with their source text so that they can be reused.
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Translation tools
(Eng. CAT, Computer Aided Translation) CAT tools, or Translation Tools, is the generic term for computer programs that semi-automate and facilitate the translation of a text from one language to another.
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Translator (Authorized Translator)
An authorized translator has passed a certification test that includes translation of a legal, a financial and a general text. The Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet) arranges these tests and is also the control agency for the country's authorized interpreters.
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TTX
When files are to be translated in the CAT tool Trados Translator's Workbench they are normally first converted to an XML based format and get the file extension ttx.
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Weighted word count
The number of words in a text, taking into account how much of the text can be reused from previous translations.
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XLIFF
XML Localization Interchange File Format XLIFF is a standard for an XML-based file format intended for material that has been extracted for translation.
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XML
Extensible Markup LanguageXML is a markup language originally developed for the web, but that can even be used for data exchange.
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Yugoslavian
Yugoslavian is in fact not a language in its own right, but rather an outdated political/geographic denotation.
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