What is Glossary / Termbase?

A termbase, or glossary in everyday usage, is a curated list of terms with their approved translations and usage notes. It covers product and feature names, domain vocabulary, and do-not-translate entries such as brand names. Where a translation memory stores whole sentences from past work, a termbase stores individual terms as deliberate decisions.

Its job is consistency. Without one, the same feature gets translated three different ways by three translators, or by the same translator in different sessions, and users cannot tell whether "Workspace" and its variants are one concept or several. CAT tools surface termbase hits while translating and can flag segments that violate the glossary.

Termbases matter just as much for machine translation: engines accept glossaries to force terminology, and LLM prompts can embed the term list directly. A small, well-maintained glossary of your product's core nouns is one of the highest-leverage localization assets a team can build, and it costs an afternoon to start.