Glossary Format

A plain text file, tab-separated, one term per line.

elektrische module  electric module
elektrische module  electrical module  forbidden
koppelmechanisme  coupling mechanism

Column
1	source term
2	target term
3	optional – forbidden marks a target that must not be used

Blank lines are ignored, and so is any line starting with #, so the file can carry comments.

Tabs, not spaces

Columns must be separated by actual tab characters. This is the commonest reason a glossary loads with no terms. The options dialog reports how many terms it parsed – check that number after choosing a file.

Matching

Matching is case-insensitive and respects word boundaries, so wire does not match inside wireless. Where two entries could both match, the longer wins and the shorter one inside it is suppressed: electric module beats a bare module.

Editing while you work

The file is re-read whenever you save it. Keep it open in a text editor beside memoQ, add a term, save, and the next segment sees it – no restart, no reloading the project.

Size

A real term base export works fine. A 9,000-term glossary loads in well under a tenth of a second and adds under a millisecond to each lookup.

Because matching is case-insensitive, very short entries are worth avoiding: a two-letter term fires on almost every segment and crowds out terms that matter.

Converting an existing term base

The plugin repository includes a converter for Supervertaler Workbench term base exports:

python tools/convert_termbase.py BEIJER.tsv BEIJER-glossary.txt

It handles the quoting and pipe-separated variants of the export format, drops entries that translate to themselves, and reports what it skipped.