Clients will often ask you to provide them with a glossary for a project you’ve translated for them; this will help them keep a record of the terminology used, ensuring that the same terminology is used in future projects. With Déjà Vu X3, creating a glossary for your client is as simple as exporting the lexicon to a text file.
For project managers, the lexicon can provide an extremely valuable tool for quickly generating glossaries for large projects with multiple translators.
Generally you will want to select 2 or 3 for this option. Higher numbers tend to result in a great deal of useless entries. Déjà Vu X3 does not linguistically evaluate the words; it simply lists all occurrences in all combinations. For example, "The cat is black" with a maximum number of 4 would be listed as "The," "cat," "is," "black," "The cat," "cat is," "is black," "The cat is," "cat is black," and "The cat is black." Of those entries, only "cat," "black," and arguably "cat is black" would be useful entries in the lexicon.
Déjà Vu X3 will use only translated rows in its translation processes, so it is possible to skip this step.
This is useful when you have finished translating the useful entries in the lexicon and want to remove the rest, or when you want to export the relevant entries in the lexicon to send to your client as a glossary.
This kind of setting may make sense for a very large project where you have some occurrences of several hundred.
Generating the Lexicon
The project’s lexicon is a list of all the source language words or phrases present in the project—in other words, an index of all terms and phrases. Once you have created this index, you can translate the terms that seem relevant to you, batch delete all other terms (for instance, terms like "the" or "to" in the image below), and Déjà Vu X3 will use what remains as the primary glossary for your projectnote.
The lexicon is a very useful tool, but it is an optional component.
To create the lexicon
- In the Lexicon section of the ribbon, click on Create Lexicon.
- The Build Lexicon dialog appears:
- You are offered the following options:
- Specify the maximum number of words for a lexicon entrynote.
- Specify whether Déjà Vu X3 should try to translate the lexicon entries as it creates them, using the termbases and translation memories for the project.
- Specify whether you want a lexicon for the current or all files.
- Select the options you want and click OK.
Depending on the size of the project, building the lexicon may take some time because Déjà Vu X3 has to process each segment in the project a number of times. While Déjà Vu X3 is working on creating the lexicon, you will see a progress indicator in the Build Lexicon dialog and finally a notification how many entries have been generated.
Once Déjà Vu X3 has finished building the lexicon, you can view it by double-clicking on Lexicon from the Project Explorer.
The first column on the table, with the heading Words Freq, shows the number of words in the lexicon entry, and the frequency, i.e., the number of times it appears in the project.
To translate the lexicon
There are several ways to translate a lexicon:
- Once the lexicon is generated, you can select resolve the lexicon with the databases.
- You can manually translate it by entering the translation into the target column.
Either way, you will want to translate only those terms that are helpful for you to have in the lexicon and delete the remaining lexicon entries.
To translate the lexicon
To avoid a large number of useless entries in the lexicon, you will probably want to delete the lexicon entries that appear only rarely in the project, or those that contain a very large number of wordsnote.
- In the Lexicon section of the ribbon, click on Remove Lexicon:
- The Remove lexicon entries dialog appears.
- You are offered the following options:
- Remove the entire lexicon.
- Remove those lexicon entries for which you have not entered a translationnote.
- Remove lexicon entries based on the number of words they contain and/or their frequency. You can also specify whether to remove those entries that satisfy these conditions and have not been translated, thereby preserving any special entries you decided to keep. The selection in the image above instructs Déjà Vu X3 to delete all rows with three or more words in the source field and ten or fewer occurrencesnote.
- Select the options you want and click OK.
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