Microsoft has relaunched it’s terminology portal and has also included the ability to download TBX format glossaries for import into most popular translation management systems. This is a very important development in our industry as access to those glossaires was made more difficult by a Microsoft subscription model for the data. Free and easy access to this data is in the best interest of all software developers, translation professionals and even end users that somehow interface with Microsoft Applications.

The ability for linguists to easily query the proper translation of a localized software term as defined by Microsoft improves the usability of software documentation and third party applications that integrate with Microsoft products. The bottom line is this should prevent or at least help to prevent improperly referenced software terms in third party applications. Nothing is more annoying to an end user when you refer to a specific path for an option like:

In order to print the configuration settings, choose File>Print>Configuration Settings.

and then the end user discovers that two out of the three software terms don’t even exist or are improperly referenced by using different terms!

This happens quite often in translated documentation when the linguist has little to no access to the proper software list.

Jost Zetsche, author of The Tool Kit newsletter did a great job of explaining the history of the access to the glossaries, the current state of the glossary access as well as explaining how other resources or online glossaries use the data from Microsoft.