Instructions for using wildcards when providing target terms

We need your help to complete the target terms in a glossary that will be used, among other things, for term consistency checks.

In column B, please enter the equivalent term in the target language. Please do not translate the source term -- this task entails some research to find out how that concept/object/reality is expressed in your language (the target language). For example, “state school” in, say, Spanish might be “escuela pública” and not “escuela del estado”.

The term in the target language must be entered in its dictionary form (e.g. singular nouns, singular/masculine adjectives, infinite verbs, in lower case, etc.), according to what is common practice in your language, except for lexicalized inflected expressions or capitalized forms.

When being used, terms might change so as to agree with their context through inflection (e.g. number, gender, conjugation, etc.), declension (cases like accusative, dative, etc.), derivation (suffixes to build lexical families, e.g. education -> educative), determination (e.g. articles, etc.). The glossary needs to reflect potential variability and we use wildcards to avoid having to write all possible forms.

1. Additional suffixation

If the dictionary form of the term may change by simply adding a suffix, simply add an asterisk (“*”) at the end. For example:

(ENG) teacher -> (ESP) the base form is profesor (masc, sing) but it might inflect in number and gender as profesora (fem, sing), profesores (pl, masc) and profesoras (pl, fem). In all those cases, the base form profesor does not change.

The target term would be: profesor*

2. Replaceable suffix

If the the dictionary form includes a suffix that might be replaced with other suffixes in different contexts, then use a pipe (“|”) to separate that variable part from the preceding invariable part. For example:

(ENG) lawyer -> (ESP) the base form is abogado (sing, masc), which can vary as abogada (sing, fem)

The target term would be: abogad|o

In this case you wouldn't use an asterisk because abogad* is an incomplete word and we need the full word for different purposes.

3. Alternative expressions

If there are several possibilities that are plausible (i.e. that are actually used in that domain and are equally correct) and do not have a common base/root, you should provide the different forms separated by a semi-colon (“;”). For example:

(ENG) household -> (ITA) is expressed as both famiglia and nucleo familiare

The target term would be: famiglia; nucleo familiare

Do not use a stroke (“/”), a hyphen (“-”) or any other symbol to separate the alternative terms.

Be careful when providing alternatives (synonyms or variants). You only need to provide the equivalents of the source term that are actually used in that domain and that should be used in that project. You should not provide more terms than the ones/s that is/are actually used in your language (regardless of how many alternative terms may be used in the source language to express that concept in different contexts).

In the few cases where the alternatives are part of the term/expression rather than the full expression, you can encircle them with parenthesis. For example:

(ENG) household -> (ESP) is expressed as both núcleo familiar and núcleo doméstico (fictional example)

The target term would be: núcleo (familiar;doméstico)

Or if the above looks a bit too complex, you can simply write The target term would be: núcleo familiar; núcleo doméstico, even if you repeat “núcleo”.

If for any reason there's no target equivalent in your language, leave the cell empty -- do not write “N/A”, “not existing” or anything at all, but please insert a pop-up comment (in Review -> New Comment).

If you have the slightest doubt, please please please ask.