Build the glossary before the bulk translation, not after
An item is called one thing in the inventory screen, a slightly different thing in the crafting menu, and a third thing in a quest reward pop-up — all in the same target language, all technically defensible translations of the same source word. None of this is a translator error. It is what happens when translation starts before terminology is decided.
A glossary and a style guide exist to remove that ambiguity before it can happen, not to clean it up afterward. Retrofitting consistency across a few thousand already-translated lines is far more expensive than deciding a term once, up front.
What a glossary is for
A glossary is a fixed mapping: this source term translates to exactly this target term, everywhere it appears. Item names, skill and ability names, currency names, faction and location names, and UI verbs (equip, craft, discard, confirm) are the classic candidates — anything that appears in more than one screen and that a player would notice if it changed.
The list does not need to be exhaustive on day one. It needs to cover the terms that repeat across many strings and many screens, because those are exactly the terms where an inconsistency is both likely and visible.
What a style guide covers beyond word choice
A glossary fixes individual terms; a style guide fixes the decisions that apply across all of them. Without a documented answer, each translator will settle these differently, and every difference reads as inconsistency to a player even when each individual choice is reasonable:
- Tone and register — formal or casual, and for which character or UI context
- Politeness level, where the target language marks it grammatically
- Punctuation conventions — how exclamation, ellipsis, and quotation marks are used
- Number and date formatting conventions for the target locale
- How placeholders and variables are referred to and where they may move in a sentence
Sequencing: before, not after
The natural temptation is to start translating and build the glossary reactively, term by term, as inconsistencies surface. This works, technically, but it means every early string is a candidate for later revision, and every reviewer spends time re-litigating decisions that could have been made once.
Drafting the glossary and style guide before bulk translation begins costs a small amount of up-front time from someone who knows both the game and the target language. It pays for itself the first time a term appears in the fiftieth string instead of the fifth.
Enforcement: review against the document, not against memory
A glossary that exists but is never checked against is a glossary in name only. Consistency checking should compare each translated string to the current glossary entry, not rely on a reviewer remembering how a term was translated three hundred lines ago — memory is exactly the failure mode a glossary is meant to remove.
This is mechanical work in the best sense: given a source term and its glossary entry, checking whether the target string uses the approved translation is something that does not require re-reading the whole file, which frees reviewers to spend their attention on the things that genuinely need a human judgment call, like tone.
Keeping both documents alive as the game grows
A glossary and style guide are not one-time deliverables. New items, new systems, and new characters introduce new terms and new tone decisions, and if those additions do not go through the same document, the game accumulates a second, undocumented glossary that only lives in individual translators' memory.
Treating the glossary as a living document — updated whenever a new recurring term is introduced, reviewed periodically alongside new content — is what keeps a game's terminology coherent after its first ten updates, not just its first release.