Home » Knowledge Base » Glossary

Glossary

C#, Csharp

A .NET programming language. Some would say it is the native language of .NET.

X
CAT

Abbreviation for "Computer Assisted Translation". Translation process in which a human translator uses software (such as translation memory and terminology management systems) to obtain a higher degree of precision and efficiency. Note the difference between CAT software, where the software merely assists the human translator by improving the work process and the final outcome, and machine translation software, where the computer performs the actual translation.

X
Character Set

The computer codes that represent the characters of a language.  8-bit (byte) codes have dominated in the early days of computing, when memory and storage were at a premium. 16-bit codes are adequate to represent all the characters of all human languages.  The mapping of characters to codes is called encoding.

X
Class

Classes are used in object-oriented programming to group related variables and functions.

X
Code page

A term used by operating systems to describe the character set encoding.  For example, the most common code page is Windows CP1252, which is the same as ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) plus a few characters.

X
COM

Mostly used as an umbrella term for OLE, OLE automation, ActiveX, COM+ and DCOM technologies.  The advantage of COM is that it makes it possible to create software objects which can be used from a variety of programming languages.  For example, a Delphi program can use an object created with Visual Basic.

X
Content negotiation

Requests from a web browser to a web server for a preferred language (or locale) and a character set. If the server has content in the requested language, this content would be sent by the server to the browser.

X
Controlled language

Language based on strict rules, such as the use of standardized terminology, a restricted vocabulary and a limited set of grammatical and stylistic rules. Texts written in controlled language are optimized for machine translation, CAT, or other forms of NLP.

X
Cultural Differences

Software developers and translators should be aware of cultural issues, ranging from the meaning of icons to presentation of numbers to wider topics such as political conflicts when localizing a program.
Here are some of the issues to be taken into consideration:
•    How formally should I write?
•    May I use people's names, and if so – which names?
•    How are dates and numbers written in the target market?
•    Does my product make reference to holidays which are not observed in the target market?
•    Does my product name have negative connotations in the target language?
 

X