Translation Style Guides can be provided by clients or developed by translation companies or translators. They are a very good complement to glossaries, adding relevant information linked or not to terminology, and helping to guarantee a better consistency between translated texts.

In general, they list grammatical rules that usually cause problems to translators. For instance, in French, translators might sometimes hesitate when faced with the plural of compound words. In order to make their work easier, some typical examples, very frequent in the client's texts, might be listed in the French Style Guide.

Style Guides also list various clients' preferences. For instance, a French client will rather have the dates presented in groups of 2 figures only (14-02-09) while others will require the year to be fully written (14-02-2009) or even the month to be written in letters (14 février 2009).

They also provide lists of standard terms that might, for some, already be present in glossaries but on which they want to put the focus due to their very repetitive aspect. For instance, in some documents, English words like "Warning", "Caution", "Note" frequently appear to emphasize the kind of information given. Providing standard translations for those words in a French Style Guide might help making sure they will always be translated consistently throughout all texts when used for this purpose. Indeed, as a translation of the English word "Note", both French terms "remarque" and "note" might be accepted in the flow of a text, but the Style Guide might instruct to always use the French word "Note" when used for emphasing or as sub-title.

Obviously the kind of information that can be found in Translation Style Guides will vary from one client to another and will depend on the writer. Some contain only a few pages while others count hundreds of pages. Apart from the sections described above, information can be found about formatting of specific words, punctuation, instructions on reference glossaries to use, sections containing standard texts already translated (like the copyright paragraph of a company or the translation of some logos), style to adopt for specific areas (marketing texts versus legal texts for instance), ways to translate titles within the company, product names, etc.

All this information is a precious complement to glossaries, providing not only pure terminology information but also "non-terminology" information that can be very important on the linguistic side.

A lot of CAT tools exist on the market. In our case, we mainly use Translation Memory tools1. Besides the leveraging aspect, TM tools are very useful to guarantee consistency within a translated text or between several translation projects, and even among several people. Their various formats allow the translators to exchange the TM database contents and make sure they use the same terminology. Most of those tools provide a functionality to search for specific terms and display the results with context information.

This kind of material should of course not replace glossaries, but certainly represents a very good complement.

• 1. Translation Memories (TM) are a type of Computer-Aided tools. The principle is to save the translated segments (parts of text) within a database which will store each source segment together with its corresponding translation. Whenever the same source segment appears in the same document or in another text, the tool proposes the stored translation. If the source text is not exactly the same but is still quite similar, the stored translation is also proposed but some indications show which source parts are different and should consequently be adapted within the translation.

With the development of modern telecom and Internet, communication between translators is easier than ever. A lot of public forums allow them to exchange information and ideas, among other things about translation of some new terms.

For our part, we have also setup a private forum used by our teams. They use it to exchange ideas on certain projects and to access some reference material. Forums are a very good way to centralize project information, to easily distribute instructions and to share feedback. When a reviewer decides to change the translation of a term, posting this information on the forum will benefit the entire team and not only the translator receiving feedback on his own translation.