Google Translator Toolkit: how to use TM & glossaries

Google translator toolkit supports the TMX file format for its TM. The tmx must be 1.0 or later verion to be uploaded. You can upload the TM file from your local PC or create the new TM which can be automatically stored on the web space provided by Google. You can upload your TM when you upload your translation file or separately upload it by clicking "Translation memories" menu on the side menu bar. You can also set the TM to share with other users.

If there is any translation unit that matches with the source segment in the uploaded TM, it will be automatically implemented to the segment and other segments that have very low matches with the uploaded TM will be automatically translated by Google's machine translation feature. Google currently provides up to 50 MB of space to upload the TM.

Now let's look at the glossary files that you might want to use and share with other users. The file format of glossary must be CSV that everyone loves. The glossary file should consist of the header row and data rows. Check out following glossary form that Google suggests:

As you see on the above screenshot, you must indicate source and target locale codes on the header row. For locale codes, please see http://translate.google.com/support/toolkit/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=147854.

I have made my test glossary file using MS Excel but you can create your glossaries on Google Docs or OpenOffice Calc.

Creating Glossaries in Google Docs

Click File > Export > .csv Sheet only (Depending on your web browser, there are different ways to save this CSV to your computer).

Google Chrome

1. Right click on the page and choose Save as...
2. In the "Save As" box, save the file to your desktop with a .csv extention.

Mozilla Firefox

1. Click File > Save Page As...
2. In the "Save As" dialog, save the file to your desktop with a .csv extention.

Internet Explorer

1. Click File > Save As...
2. In the "Save As" dialog, save as type Text File (*.txt) with an encoding Unicode (UTF-8). Do not give the file a .csv extention. If you do that the page would be saved as HTML.
3. When the file is save on your computer, change the extention to .csv.

Creating Glossaries in OpenOffice Calc

1. Click File > Save As...
2. In the "Save As" dialog, save as type "Text CSV (.csv)" and check the Edit Filter settings box.
3. If you are prompted to save the document regardless of formatting, click Yes to save in Text CSV file format.
4. In the "Export of text files" dialog, choose Unicode (UTF-8) character set with a comma Field delimiter and a doubl-quotes Text delimiter. Make sure the Save cell content as shown box is checked, and the Fixed column width box is not.
5. Click OK to save the file.