Oracle Glossary: History
As promised, we talk about Oracle Glossaries, which was created by a team of RDTEX technical specialists and is now available to everyone who works with databases. The glossary is freely available on our website and currently contains 14,537 terms.
Why do we need a glossary if there are dictionaries?
Of course, there are dictionaries, but when translating highly specialized texts, for example, materials on medicine or technical documentation, as well as if there is a lot of text and different people work on different parts of the translation, you can’t do without a glossary.
The glossary itself is a very important part of the translation process, ensuring the uniformity of terms in all translated documentation, regardless of the number of translators and their interchangeability.
How did the Oracle glossary appear? Who collected it?
Our company was established in 1992 by a team of young scientists from the Institute of High Energy Physics. In parallel with the development of information systems and technical support, RDTECH developed another area of activity – the official translation and distribution of Oracle technical documentation in Russian.
In the 90s, very few database administrators and application developers spoke English at a level that allowed them to freely read professional technical literature in the original, so translations were very much in demand.
The first such project under RDTEX was the translation of Oracle 7 documentation, which began in 1993.
With rare exceptions, translation of the documentation was carried out by almost all technical specialists of the development department, technical support center, project managers, teachers of the RDTEX Training Center – this was a kind of training.
The forefront of RDTEX translators was put forward the task of making the work of Oracle users as easy as possible. That is why Russian-language versions of books are presented in a clear and simple language, without errors and typos of the original. It is important that the examples given in the books were experimentally verified.
According to the recollections of our colleagues who participated in the translation of the documentation, the error messages in the original were difficult to understand, so I had to recreate the situation in Oracle to determine how the message should sound in Russian.
The translation of each of the books was accompanied by quality control in accordance with the criteria developed by the RDTEX Translation Center for many years of translation experience.
All translation projects from 1993 to 2008 were accompanied by a glossary, which in 2004 was open for public access on the RDTEX website and today can be used by everyone as a reference tool for reading and translating documentation and articles on Oracle DBMSs. Our glossary provides the most comprehensive terminology related to databases in general and to Oracle above all.
And what do the participants in the translation projects say?
Says Sergey Petrovich Misyura, Director of the RDTECH Technical Support Center:
“The Oracle Glossary of Glossary was formed around 1994-1995.
Its compiler and first editor was Alexander Petrovich Sokolov, a legendary person, one of the founders of our company, who brought the first Oracle software distribution to IHEP (Institute for High Energy Physics, Protvino) from VNIISI (All-Union Research Institute for System Research, Moscow) in 1984 .
I have been working at RDTEX since 1995. In the first half of the zero years, due to the illness of Alexander Petrovich, I became his successor – responsible for the terminology in translation projects. Accordingly, the maintenance of the glossary became my responsibility.
I recall 1995, when I had the norm to translate 8 pages of documentation every day – everything was done with a regular text editor. Moreover, it was necessary not only to translate, but also to format the text using the LaTeX program known in the scientific community. ”
The RDTEX glossary is also unique in that it was created by a real team of physical translators and programmers, a passionate and creative IT community.
