The easiest way to share a glossary file between two translators using Dropbox.

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hen several translators work together on a project, sometimes they need to share a glossary. Nowadays file hosting and web synch systems such as Dropbox are becoming increasingly popular, we thought to outline a procedure to share a simple text file, like those used in OmegaT.

OmegaT and glossary files

This procedure has been designed and tested with the well-known open source CAT tool OmegaT. OmegaT can access glossaries if they are saved in the default /glossary/ folder (inside the project folder). You can also put glossaries in subfolders, because OmegaT searches all folders recursively. Glossary files need to be plain text files, either tab-delimited or formatted as TBX. This procedure has been tested with tab-delimited files.

How to share a glossary on a network

Basically, if you work in a team for the same client or on the same project, we recommend saving the glossary in a network folder, so that is accessible and editable by the translators. If the translators involved are more than two, you will need to determine who is the supervisor, that is, who is responsible, among all those who have access privileges, to validate the terms introduced. On the market there are many systems that allow you to set a complete database with different privileges depending on the user type. However, the disadvantage of these systems - apart from their complexity - is the fact that the glossary content is not immediately readable by OmegaT.

Image via Wikipedia

As an alternative, much simpler, we suggest a procedure involving Dropbox, but also applicable to other file hosting and automatic synching systems. These are the steps:

1. Create a subfolder named Glossary inside your Dropbox main folder
   
2. Go to www.dropbox.com and access the control panel
3. Click the Sharing tab
   
4. Click the first button on the left, “Share a folder”
5. Choose “I'd like to share an existing folder”
6. Click Next
7. Choose the folder containing the files to share
8. In the next screen, choose “Invite collaborators to this folder” and enter the email address of the person with whom you want to share the file. If you wish, you can add a comment in the field below.
9. The chosen person will be notified by mail and from that moment he will be able to access the shared folder containing the file.
10. Go to the project properties in OmegaT and set the path to the shared file as path to the glossary. In this way, any change to the glossary file will appear simultaneously on the screen of all translators, without having to reload the project.

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