Bilingual Glossary Maintenance

In high-resource languages, terminology is a lookup problem: the standard term exists, in a dictionary or an industry termbase, and the translator’s job is to find it. For the Afghan languages, across the institutional and technical domains this firm serves, the dictionary runs out early. The settled term for an insurance co-payment, a special-education evaluation, a phishing attempt, or a model hallucination often does not exist — or exists in three competing variants split across dialect bands and a diaspora whose usage keeps moving. Institutional vocabulary itself has shifted with Afghanistan’s institutions, and the diaspora’s usage and the country’s usage no longer move together.

So somebody decides. Under the industry default, that somebody is each translator, alone, on deadline — which is why the same English term arrives three ways across one hospital’s documents, why opposing counsel can impeach a transcript with the agency’s own earlier filings, and why a model trained on the output learns the inconsistency as if it were signal. And the spreadsheet glossary somebody built years ago does not fix this; unmaintained, it is simply the oldest of the competing decisions.

The Factory’s answer is to make terminology a governed asset: terms decided by qualified senior linguists, with the rationale recorded; variants captured by dialect band instead of collapsed; every entry versioned; and the whole of it maintained on a cycle — because a glossary is only as good as its last review.