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Translation Industry Abbreviations
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May 24, 2016
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Luke Sewell
| Abbreviation | Meaning | Further Information |
| ATA | American Translators Association | A professional association founded to advance and foster the development of translators, interpreters and the industry. |
| .bak | Trados backup file | This contains both the source and target text in a translation. |
| CAT | Computer-Assisted Translation | The CAT tool has since been replaced by the abbreviation TEnT (see below) |
| CSR | Corporate Social Responsibility | Companies which take responsibility for the impact they have on society. |
| CV | Curriculum Vitae | Commonly referred to as a person’s resume. |
| DP | Data Processing | Manipulation of data by a computer and the conversion of raw data to a machine-readable format. |
| EOB | End of Business | Unless specified this is the hour at which a business working day finishes. It is universally considered to be 5 or 6PM. |
| EOD | End of Day | EOB and EOD are often interchangeable. |
| ELIA | European Language Industry Association | A professional association, bringing together European professional translation, localization and interpreting companies. |
| ELL | English Language Learner | Refers to a person learning the English language in addition to their native language. See also LEP below. |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider | Company providing individuals and other businesses with access to the internet and related services. |
| ITI | Institute of Translation and Interpreting | The only dedicated professional translation and interpreting association in the United Kingdom. |
| LEP | Limited English Proficiency | Used in the United States to refer to a person who is not fluent in the English language or it is not their native tongue. Both LEP and ELL are used by the United States Office for Civil Rights. |
| LISA | Localization Industry Standards Association | Closing in 2011, LISA played a significant role in the translation of computer software into multiple languages. |
| LSP | Language Service Provider | Considered to be a freelance translator or professional human translation agency. |
| MT | Machine Translation | Translation carried out by a computer. |
| OCR | Optical Character Recognition | OCRing is the verb used for talking about scanning a document in ABBYY FineReader before creating a usable file in Word that can then be translated using Trados. |
| PEMT | Post-Editing Machine Translation | The process of post-editing and improving a machine generated translation that requires a minimum of manual labour. |
| PM | Project Manager | In overall charge of the planning and execution of a translation or interpretation project. |
| PO | Purchase Order | The Project Manager will issue a purchase order for each translation job. |
| QA | Quality Assurance | The key component of a translation management system and its ability to deliver a high level of quality in translations and interpretations. |
| SL | Source Language | The original language which is to be translated or interpreted into another language. |
| SOB | Start of Business | This refers to the time when the Project Manager begins their work day and is expecting to receive a finished translation. |
| TBX | TermBase eXchange | An international standard that defines an Extensible Mark-up Language (XML – see below) format for the exchange of terminology data. |
| TEP | Translation Editing Proofreading | An acronym used for the three-steps of the translation process. |
| TEnT | Translation Environment Tool | The German-American translator, Jost Oliver Zetzsche coined the term for computer-assisted translation tools. |
| T&I | Translation & Interpreting | |
| TL | Target Language | The language into which a text, document or speech is translation or interpreted. |
| TM | Translation Memory | Database that stores segments of sentences and paragraphs that have been previously translated in order to aid professional human translators. |
| TMX | Translation Memory Exchange Format | Enables the interchange of translation memories between different translation suppliers. |
| XML | Extensible Mark-up Language | Defines a set of rules for encoding documents in both a human and machine-readable format. |
| WYSIWYG | What You See Is What You Get | An acronym used in computing to describe a system where the content displayed during the editing process appears to be similar to the final output. |