What is a Fallback Language?
A Fallback Language is essentially the source language of an old Glossary that is not a source language of any assigned Linguistic Package in the account. Meaning, it is not exactly a source language your content is translated from. You can use the Glossary terms in the Fallback Language as terms in any source language you are translating in, and these will be highlighted to linguists in the CAT Tool.
Why is a Fallback Language needed?
Migration
Historically, Glossaries can contain source languages that do not match the source language of a Linguistic Package. They are often different but similar locales. For example, the Glossary might have a source locale "en" and the assigned Linguistic Packages in the account could have a source language of en-GB or en-US. Because of the mismatch of locales, it leads to source languages having no termbase to highlight to linguists in the CAT Tool.
A solution to this would be to export the Glossary and spend time creating a termbase for each empty language listed. This may take some time to complete, and more often than not, you will just want some term guidance provided to linguists as they translate your content in the CAT Tool.
An efficient solution to remedy this is to apply the terms listed as the existing Glossary's source as terms in a Linguistic Package source in the CAT Tool. For example, the terms listed under "en" could be highlighted in the CAT Tool to linguists translating from an en-US or en-GB source.
This does not copy terms across locales in the Glossary list, it simply highlights terms in the CAT Tool.
Cross-locale termbase leverage
A Fallback Language can also be leveraged when users want to maintain consistency in their glossary for terms that are across different but typically similar locales. If a user has a robust glossary for Spanish (Mexico) es-MX, they can choose to leverage those glossary terms for similar locales Spanish (Columbia), Spanish (Argentina), Spanish (Chile).
How to Apply Fallback Language Terms to Other Languages
Account Owners and Project Managers can access the Glossary by the following steps:
- Go to Account Settings
- Under Linguistic Packages, click Glossaries
- Click the ellipses on the Glossary you want to work on
- Click Edit Details
- The source language for the Glossary is listed under Fallback Language
- Under Languages, choose the languages you want to apply the Fallback Language termbase to in the CAT Tool
- Any languages you remove from the language list will result in no terms being highlighted in the CAT Tool for that locale.
- You can create a termbase for that locale offline and import when it's ready.
- Click Edit
This does not copy terms across locales in the Glossary list, it simply highlights terms in the CAT Tool.
Updating Fallback Glossary Terms in the CAT Tool
If a linguist has the Glossary permissions and wanted to correct a Fallback Glossary term, e.g. color to colour, they can do so by following the steps outlined in this article. It is important to note that this action will just update the term in the language pairs that they are working on in the CAT Tool, leaving the Fallback Language terms unchanged, as intended.