More than 2,000 individual decisions
A glossary is not a vocabulary list
Preparing the German edition did not mean simply finding a German word for each English headword. A technical term has to agree with its definition. Synonyms, related terms, and cross-references have to lead somewhere useful. A choice made under the letter A still has to work under M—and the same term cannot quietly acquire a different meaning several hundred pages later.
The entries came from implant surgery, prosthodontics, anatomy, biomaterials, radiology, histology, and other disciplines, each with its own conventions and occasional ambiguities. Existing German terms had to be researched and weighed against one another. Where usage varied, a defensible choice had to be made. And once made, it had to remain consistent throughout the book.
Terminology is where subject knowledge becomes language. In GOMI, that happened more than 2,000 times—not as a collection of isolated translations, but as a connected terminological system.
- translation of more than 2,000 specialized terms and definitions
- research and coordination of German terminology
- systematic consistency among headwords, definitions, synonyms, and cross-references
- translation of the accompanying texts and figure information
- work on the Italian edition in collaboration with A. S. Ferrari
The finished book makes much of this work nearly invisible. Ideally, readers do not notice the thousands of decisions behind it; they simply find the term they need and understand the definition. That apparent effortlessness was precisely the achievement.